Any ex ClearCase or VSS users out there?

[Krzysztof Nowicki]

Vincent Ladeuil wrote:
>>>>>> "KN" == Krzysztof Nowicki <krissn at op.pl> writes:
> 
> <snip/>
> 
>     KN> ClearCase versions each file independently, so it's a bit
>     KN> like CVS (with the difference that it also versions
>     KN> directories, while CVS doesn't).
> 
> Ok.
> 
>     KN> bzr log/qlog prints a tree of commits affecting a file,
>     KN> so it's quite similar here.
> 
> Hmm, not really.
> 
> 'bzr log' shows the history of the branch.
> 
> 'bzr qlog' too, but 'bzr qlog branch1 branch2' will show the
> history of the two branches, and 'bzr qlog repo/*' will show the
> history of all the branches under 'repo/'.
> 
> 'bzr log FILE' will show a restricted history (only the commits
> affecting files).
> 
> 'bzr qannotate FILE', in addition to the annotations, will show
> you the per-file graph: the commits where FILE were involved.
> 
>     KN> The main difference is that ClearCase being a centralized
>     KN> VCS, always prints the full version tree of a file
>     KN> including all branches, including those that haven't been
>     KN> merged.
> 
> Interesting. bzr can't do that right now, but it's also because
> it's distributed and that the branches may not be even readable
> by the user (or physically present).
> 
>     KN> This means that you can always preview the work of other
>     KN> people on their private branches. If I understand Bazaar
>     KN> correctly this is not possible there, even if everybody
>     KN> would work on checkouts or regularly push their private
>     KN> branches to the repository.
> 
> The modifications that are not yet committed can be "previewed"
> that way, but if people published all their branches on a central
> server, then you can use 'bzr qlog repo/*' or whatever 'repo/*'
> glob is appropriate.
> 
>     KN> I think however that with a bit of hacking it should be
>     KN> possible to produce a full revision log of a file using
>     KN> the data stored in the repository, since Bazaar tracks
>     KN> files using file ids. Am I right?
> 
> Yes you are, that's what 'bzr qannotate FILE' does.
> 
>     Vincent

Thanks. I didn't know that you can show a given list of branches with qlog. Nice
feature. As for qannotate I don't see it being useful to display a full file
history, but the repo I have here is not heavily used yet, so there is no good
example of a file to test.

Planning to move from ClearCase to Bazaar I was also thinking how to organize
multisite development. ClearCase multisite is a bit messy, but it works
providing you get used to it. I'm thinking about automirror at the moment, but I
didn't have time to set it up yet. The goal is to have the main development
branches synchronized on both sides. What I fear however is that pushing large
commits may be a performance hit. Making a commit with ~10k files is not very
rare over here and the bandwidth of the link between the sites isn't really
record breaking...

ClearCase handles multisite repositories by having every branch owned by only
one site (it's read-only for all other ones). Synchronization between the
branches is performed via automatic merges between two main development branches
on both sites. Initially I wanted to replicate that behaviour in Bazaar, but
I've hit bug 69489.

K.