baltimore_dad

After part 1, we know how to create, checkout, and modify a single copy of code. It’s almost no different from CVS from a normal user’s standpoint. Add, checkout, commit, status, diff, etc. all do pretty much what they do in CVS. When dealing with a team of developers this can be a good thing, as the time spent learning the basics of the new VCS is minimized. Anyway, on to the point of this post, branching.

As I said in part one I still like the idea of a central branch, a “HEAD” if you will. I think there is also a need for “official” branches. Things like maintenance branches for each release/patch should be managed. However, I think users should be free to create their own branches for features as needed. In this post I’m going to take a look at how bazaar handles branches.

Creating a branch is very simple, you just issue the bzr branch command

[andrew karma] /Users/andrew/Development/BZR
>>>>>> bzr branch myProject myProject.branch1
Branched 2 revision(s).

[andrew karma] /Users/andrew/Development/BZR
>>>>>> ls
total 0
0 myProject/ 0 myProject.branch1/

As you can see, the branch operation created a new directory, myProject.branch1. Again, this would work with local files, remote files (via SFTP, or other protocol) as described in the documentation. Lets take a look at what myProject.branch1 is.

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Ok, this is going to be nothing new for those of you who have gone through the 5 minute tutorial on the bzr website. I’m going through it again here, so the rest of this follows. First, I created a directory like this:

% ls -R myProject
0 myDir/ 8 test1.txt 8 test2.txt 8 test3.txt
myProject/myDir:
total 0
0 test4.txt

All of the .txt files have the line “Initial Content” in them. Once this was setup, I did the following:

put myProject under management.

[andrew karma] /Users/andrew/Development/BZR/myProject
>>>>>> bzr init
Created a standalone tree (format: pack-0.92)

add the files in myProject to bzr

[andrew karma] /Users/andrew/Development/BZR/myProject
>>>>>> bzr add
adding myDir
adding test1.txt
adding test2.txt
adding test3.txt
adding myDir/test4.txt

finally, commit

[andrew karma] /Users/andrew/Development/BZR/myProject
>>>>>> bzr commit -m “First Commit”
Committing to: /Users/andrew/Development/BZR/myProject/
added myDir
added test1.txt
added test2.txt
added test3.txt
added myDir/test4.txt
Committed revision 1.

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First, some background. I work in a fast paced development shop, with a team of very talented engineers. We are currently using CVS to manage our codebase. In the not too distant past, we were actively working on as many as four different branches. Keeping code appropriately syncronized between the various branches was exceedingly difficult. I’ve been working on a little coding in my spare time, and figured now was as good a time as any to educate myself on some of the newer version control systems. I started playing around with GIT, and didn’t really see a clear line towards what I want to accomplish. Bazaar seemed to be explicitly designed to handle several different workflows. Also, it is more similar to CVS than GIT, which can be both good and bad, but things worked a little more like I expected them to with bazaar. Anyway, what do I want to do with version control?

In short I think I’d like to see a main branch, what CVS likes to call HEAD. Several release branches for maintenance, and any number of feature branches. I envision HEAD, and the release branches to be “officially” managed, while developers are more or less free to branch for features as they need to. What this requires, is some sane way to ensure that code reaches HEAD/the appropriate maintenance branch when it’s needed. With as little hell as possible. Merging branches in CVS is an f’ing nightmare.

So, given that I like what I’ve seen from bazaar so far, and a very loose idea of where I want to get, I’m going to start seeing how well bazaar fits. I’ll post what I find.