migrating from CVS

[Jos Backus]

On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 05:41:51PM +1100, Martin Pool wrote:
> On  5 Mar 2006, Jos Backus <jos at catnook.com> wrote:
> There's a couple of different axes: (1) where the history is stored, (2)
> and how the various files and directories are linked together.
> 
> (1) In CVS, as in Subversion, you create a separate repository that will
> hold all the history.  In bzr, by default the history is stored in the
> .bzr directory, so the tree carries its history with it.  However, you can
> instead create a separate self-contained repository (see recent
> discussions), which will store history for several (typically related)
> branches.
 
So it's possible to mimic the Subversion behavior of having a central
repository if desired. Good. I am following the discussion on the two types of
repositories Bazaar-NG supports; Bazaar-NG has a leg up here as while
Subversion stores recent history on the client so one can run diff/log/etc.,
it's not a truly distributed system as one cannot commit/branch/etc.

> (2) CVS versions each file separately, and implements directories by
> just checking in or out all the files within the directory severally.
> svn, like bzr, versions directories as first-class objects, but the
> approach is somewhat different.  In svn the whole repository is viewed
> as one super-tree, relying on convention to say which directories are
> considered the top of actual source directories.  In bzr there is more
> of a distinction between directories that exist as separate branches,
> and subdirectories within a source tree.

OK. Sounds like Subversion requires more namespace management than Bazaar-NG
as a result of its design.

> > I'm assuming the sharing pertains to file/directory (meta-)data
> > between the branches that the working trees are an instantiation of?
> 
> Yes.  It's shared in the sense that the is shared between two different
> branches.
 
OK. I'm assuming `file/directory (meta-)data' was accidentally left out here.

Thanks,
-- 
Jos Backus
jos at catnook.com