Code review comment for lp://staging/~parthm/bzr/173274-export-hooks

John A Meinel wrote:
> Just mentioning that "--uncommitted" sounds to me like "give me the
> content of the *versioned* files that hasn't been committed yet". Which
> is how merge uses it. Specifically, you don't get junk files when you
> 'merge --uncomitted'.

Yes, I think uncommitted-but-versioned isn't what the use case is asking for.
It is asking for a way to get some (all?) unversioned files included (and
probably uncommitted changes too).

I'm not sure exactly what would best suit the use case (bzr export of a tree
including 'autoconf' output). Typically you wouldn't want to export all ignored
files (e.g. usually you don't want to ship: tags, *.pyc, *.o, ...). Perhaps the
hypothetical 'precious' designation is good enough, but I'm not sure it's an
exact fit. So I suspect a complete, polished solution may involve some extra
complexity (perhaps just some config in bzrrules to define some files as
unversioned_exportable)...

But that's policy. In terms of mechanism, we need a hook or other API that
gives a plugin a way to:

  * cause selected unversioned files to be included in the export
  * cause uncommitted versions of versioned files to be included in the export

Then we should be able to support whatever exact behaviour is needed.