R – Bazaar offline + branches

bazaar

I have a Bazaar repository on Host A with multiple branches. This is my main repository.

Until now, I have been doing checkouts on my other machines and committing directly to the main repository. However, now I am consolidating all my work to my laptop and multiple VMs. I need to be working offline regularly. In particular, I need to create/delete/merge branches all while offline.

I was thinking of continuing to have the master on Host A with a clone of the repository on the laptop with each vms doing checkouts of the clone.

Then, when I go offline, I could do bzr unbind on the clone and bzr bind when I am back online.

This failed as soon as I tried to bzr clone since bzr clone only clones a branch(!!!!)

I need some serious help. If Hg would handle this better please let me know (I need Windows support.) However, at this moment I cannot switch from Bazaar as it is too close to some important deadlines.

Thanks in advance!

Best Solution

bzr fundamentally works with one branch / directory (the branch are visible at the file system level), so if you need to clone each branch from your repository (not unlike svn, in a way). Hg, at basic level, works this way too (although you can put several branches in one repository using say named branches).

For DVCS, it is important to distinguish between the following:

Working tree: a versioned set of files (at a given revision)
Branch: a linear set of revisions
Repository: a set of revisions

When you clone locally a directory versioned by bzr, you are copying the repository subset which contains all the revisions in the branch you are cloning, and get the working tree. This assumes you are not asking for a branch wo a working tree nor using a shared repository.

What you want, IIUC, is to clone the full repository with all the branches. There is no 'native' way to do so in bzr I believe, but plugins to help you toward this, like multi-pull and push-repo, to sync multiple branches in one shot.

But I don't understand why that's such a big problem, or the link with working offline: you just clone the branches you want to work on your laptop.

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R – What’s the point of tags in bazaar

What are tags in bzr?

Tags are just an easy to remember handle for a particular revision. Rather than attempting to remember david@hrcsb.org-20090420170402-eql4vzvcifkz4fwy, or revno 19721, you can refer to your tag:

bzr export -r tag:foo-1.0.0.0 release-foo-1.0.0.0.tar.gz trunk/

How might I manage releases in bzr?

It sounds as if you are treating your releases as separate lines of development (aka: branches), so I would recommend tagging your trunk, so you know where you branched from and creating separate release branches:

bzr tag -r 1234 -d trunk/ foo-1.0.0.0 
bzr branch -r 1234 trunk/ release-1.x

When you do your bugfixes for 1.x releases, you do them in the release-1.x branch, tagging each point release:

bzr tag -r 1255 -d release-1.x/ foo-1.0.0.1
bzr export -r tag:foo-1.0.0.1 release-foo-1.0.0.1.tar.gz release-1.x/

Your directory structure might look something like this:

fooproj/
  release-1.x/
  release-2.x/
  trunk/

R – How to keep all the bazaar branches in multiple physical locations

Your approach is not wrong in any case. I don't recommend to rsync entire dir, but instead using bzr push in each branch. There is also exists repo-push plugin that can mirror entire shared repo with all its branches to another location, maybe this is what you need to simplify your workflow.

Best Solution

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R – What’s the point of tags in bazaar

R – How to keep all the bazaar branches in multiple physical locations

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