bzr overview questions.

[James Blackwell]

On Mon, Sep 05, 2005 at 03:55:17PM -0700, Rob Browning wrote:
> 
> After reading the material on the current bazaar-ng web pages, I had a
> few questions.  Some of the answers are implied to greater or lesser
> degrees by the existing texts, but I thought the issues might be worth
> addressing more directly, presuming they aren't already elsewhere.

Thanks for the help. Advice from people such as you ensures that the
documentation is as good as possble. Your timing is fortuitious. I'm
actively working on the wiki these days.

> 
>   - Is the working directory the same thing as an archive?  i.e. is a
>     working directory roughly equivalent to an archive and/or a branch
>     in other systems?  This seems to be the case, but it might be
>     worth stating clearly.

Yes. They are both in the same place.

>   - What is the normal way to work with other people using bzr?  The
>     main page says:

This will be covered by a series of user stories that I started tonight. 

>       * Offers a choice between centralized and decentralized work
>         within a single project: when in the office, you can work on a
>         shared central branch. For experimental changes or offline
>         work you can make a branch on your laptop and merge back in
>         later.
> 
>     But what does this mean?  Can multiple people commit to the same
>     physical destination via sftp (or similar)?

Yes, via bzr push. :) 

>     To put it another way, how does the "in the office" situation
>     differ from the laptop situation?

They don't, really. The important point is working on the same thing at
two different places. :)

>   - Does bzr handle tags, and if so, what is the current recommended
>     approach -- to just use multiple branches?  (If so, does bzr use
>     hard-links for local branches, or does this require O(n) storage
>     for n branches?  I saw the FAQ comment about "cp -al"; does bzr
>     itself do the same thing?)

Tags can mean one of two things. The first is the storage of file
identifiers in files (as bazaar and arch support). The other is a limited
form of branching.

In the bzr world, users are encouraged to branch early and often, such as: 

$ ls project-head
[ here is my source code]
$ bzr branch project-head  project-neatfeature 
$ ls project-neatfeature
[ here is the same source code again. You can work on this an commit to it
individually, later merging it back to project-head]

>   - Is rsync the recommended way to publish an archive, and if so, are
>     there any important considerations?  i.e. What happens if a pull
>     is attempted during a sync?

Concurrant operations is something better discussed by Aaron or Martin.
There also exists the "bzr push" command which can shift changes around.

>   - Is bzr sensitive to the archive location, i.e. if I move an
>     archive, do people pulling just need to know the new location, or
>     is their branch going to be confused by the change?

bzr couldn't care less. If you mv ThisIsMyBranch into /tmp, you can still
cd into the directory and hack and commit.

Also, one can branch by simply performing a cp -a:

$ cp -a project-head project-feature
$ cd project-feature
hack, hack, hack commit. hack, hack, hack commit.
$ cd ../project-head
$ bzr merge ../project-feature

> 
> Thanks
> 
> -- 
> Rob Browning
> rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org; previously @cs.utexas.edu
> GPG starting 2002-11-03 = 14DD 432F AE39 534D B592  F9A0 25C8 D377 8C7E 73A4

-- 
 James Blackwell      |   Life is made of the stuff that hasn't killed
 Tell someone a joke! |   you yet.                       - yours truly
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