best way to use bazaar on windows

[Eugene Wee]

Hi Rahul,

I have been using Bazaar on Windows for well over a year, via the 
Windows command line. It is not too bad, because you can get Bazaar to 
remember certain branch locations, configure it to open your favourite 
text editor for commit messages and it will use your default email 
client for bzr send. I have also seen a Windows user of Bazaar write a 
batch file in a tutorial on using Launchpad because at the time he was 
not aware that Bazaar could remember branch locations and open his text 
editor.[1]

Admittedly, bzr annotate and bzr diff may be a little hard to read on 
the Windows command line, but these days you can install the QBzr plugin 
and use bzr qannotate and bzr qdiff for a graphical representation.

That said, Word and Powerpoint documents are binary files. This would 
mean that features like annotate/qannotate, diff/qdiff and merge would 
not be very useful since they cannot understand the file format.[2] 
Also, I had the impression that these documents already have a history 
mechanism, so you may want to consider using that (if it exists, of 
course :P).

Regards,
Eugene Wee

[1] Developing emol! http://showmedo.com/videos/series?name=vXJsRwlBX
[2] You could still use bzr merge to merge different sets of files, but 
its ability to merge changes to the same file would be lost.

Rahul Nabar wrote:
> After about a month of using Bazaar to version my scripts and config
> files on my Linux box I thought it might be a good idea to use it for
> my Windows docs too. On Linux using Bazaar was a real breeze and a
> great experience. But Bazaar isn't really written for Windows systems,
> is it?
> 
> What's the best way to go about it on Windows?  I hardly do any coding
> in WinXP but was intending to use Bazaar to version Word and
> Powerpoint docs. I saw there were a couple of plugins ( Tortoisebzr  /
> Olive) etc. but many seemed in development versions. Besides the WinXP
> "command line" (if I may use the term!) is sort of iffy; so I probably
> should be using a GUI, right?
> 
> Do people have suggestions / pitfalls I should be aware of? Or is it
> wise to stay away from Bazaar on Windows entirely.
> 
> -Rahul
> 
>