Doubts w.r.t. development models using Bazaar

[Martin Pool]

On 4/23/07, Rohit Rai <rohitbrai at gmail.com> wrote:
> Point 1:
>
> On the website it says,
> Although Bazaar's major focus is software development, it can be used for
> other kinds of projects, as well. It works best with textual files, like
> source code, marked-up text ( e.g. HTML), and plaintext. It is less
> effective with tree-structured data (e.g. XML), and is most limited in
> dealing with opaque binary files (e.g. Microsoft Word documents).
>
> I am preparing a model for implementing open source practices and tools to a
> software factory. And I see distributed SCMs as the way to go. Out of all
> the distributed SVNs I have found Bazaar and Hg most appealing with various
> features and an important criterion being support for Windows as well as
> Linux OS.
> But I am not sure about the maturity of these systems as compared to SVN and
> other client-server SCMs.

Alexander can tell you more about our Windows support - I think it is
pretty good.  You can get an idea from the list that we do regularly
test on Windows and fix problems if they come up.  Ian is working
towards doing regular cross-platform tests.

> On important consideration will be how well can these non text data in
> comparison to SVN.
>
> Point 2:
>
> I have a strong gut feeling and am analyzing the implementation using
> automatic gatekeeper as the way to go, with might be a reviewer in between.
>
> So it is,
> developer -> reviewer -> gatekeeper -> main repository line.
>
> Will this preserve the change history and logs from the developer unto the
> main repository???

That is the model we use for developing Bazaar, and it works very
well.  People do their  individual development on their own branch -
this can be either totally distributed, or it can be a bound branch
shared by a team if they want to work more closely as in cvs/svn.
When their work has got to a good stage of completion they post a
bundle to the list for others to review.  We have a great tool Bundle
Buggy that keeps track of things that need review and what comments
have been made:

  http://bundlebuggy.aaronbentley.com/

We normally require one core developer to review a change from
another, or two developers to review a change from a less experienced
person.

After that the change goes to pqm (the patch queue manager), which
checks that all the tests pass.  This includes some structural tests
like checking copyright statements, checking that particular
constructs are not used and so on.  Another installation at Canonical
makes checks depending on the project state - sometimes no database
changes are allowed.

It's more of a toolkit than the integrated solution of Aegis, but
being able to mix central control and close cooperation with
distributed work is a very nice feature of Bazaar.

-- 
Martin