Maintaning local changes

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Russel Winder writes:
 > On Thu, 2009-08-27 at 16:32 -0400, Aaron Bentley wrote:
 > [ . . . ]
 > > If you don't want to have multiple branches, you can embed multiple
 > > lines-of-development within a single branch.  That's what loom threads are.
 > [ . . . ]
 > 
 > Would it be fair to intimate that "looms are in Bazaar what branches are
 > in Git"?  I am guessing there is a similar phrase one could posit
 > regarding how these things are done in Mercurial.

There are points of view from which you can say those things, but
either so abstract as to be useless for understanding concrete
workflows, or so specialized as to be unlikely to apply to most
workflows (and therefore not the reader's).  So I think it is more
likely to cause confusion than anything else.

It is true that what is accomplished in Bazaar by looms can (to a
certain extent, and more manually) be accomplished in git by
manipulating branch pointers.  But that's sort of a tautology, almost
everything in git is accomplished by manipulating branch pointers.
However, the correspondence is not exact; to emulate looms in git,
either the user or some additional infrastructure (not supplied by git
or any of its derivatives AFAIK) must keep track of certain
information that looms handle transparently.  OTOH, git branches are
more adaptable to various workflows than looms are, AFAICS.

Unfortunately, we remain in a state where the workflows supported well
by the various VCSes are quite different, and where the low-level
operations that support them in each VCS do not correspond very
accurately.