Bazaar (continued)
I got a few responses to the comparison between CVS, Subversion and Bazaar command line interfaces I posted earlier from Elijah, Mikael and David. As I stated in that post, I was looking at areas where the three systems could be compared. Of course, most people would choose Arch because of the things it can do with it that Subversion and CVS can't. Below I'll discuss two of those things: disconnected development and distributed development. I'll follow on from the examples in the previous post. Disconnected Development Disconnected development allows you to continue working on some code while not having access to the main repository. I hinted at how to do this in the previous post, but left out most of the details. The basic steps are: Create an archive on your machine Branch the module you want to work on into your local archive. Perform your development as normal When you connect again, switch back to the mainline, merge your local branch and commit the changes. To create the local archive, you follow the same procedure as for creating the original archive. Something like this: mkdir ~/archives baz make-archive --signed joe@example.com ~/archives/joe@example.com This creates an archive named joe@example.com (archive names are required to be an email address, optionally followed by some extra info) stored in the user's home directory. Now we can create a branch in the local archive. From a working copy of the mainline branch, run the following command: baz branch joe@example.com/modulename--devel--0 It was necessary to specify an archive name in this call to baz branch, because the branch was being created in a different archive to the one the working copy was pointing at. This leaves the working copy pointing at the new branch, so you can start working on it immediately. You can commit as many revisions as you want, and compare to other revisions on the branch. When you have access to the main repository again, it is trivial to merge your changes back into the mainline: baz switch arch@example.org/modulename--devel--0 baz merge joe@example.com/modulename--devel--0 fix conflicts, if any exist, and mark them resolved baz commit -s 'merge changes from joe@example.com/modulename--devel--0' You can then ignore the branch in the joe@example.com archive, or continue to use it. If you want to continue working on the branch in that module, it is a simple matter to merge from the arch@example.org archive first to pick up the changes made while you were disconnected. Distributed Development In a distributed development environment, there is no main branch. Instead, each developer maintains their own branch, and pulls changes from other developers' archives. A few things fall out from this model: To start working on a distributed project, you need to branch off from another developer's archive. This can be achieved using the same instructions as found in the "disconnected development" section above. In order for other developers to pull changes from your archive, they will need to be able to access it. This isn't possible if it only exists in your home…