Re: Emacs Bazaar repository

[Matthieu Moy]

Andreas Schwab <address@hidden> writes:

> Matthieu Moy <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> As opposed to that, bzr makes the distinction between "mainline
>> revisions" (that you commited in the branch), and merged revisions
>> (ancestors of merge commits that you brought here with a merge).
>
> Is that a useful distinction?

It really depends on your flow.

If the organization of developers forms a kind of tree, then on each
branch, bzr will show the revisions in a kind of hierarchical way,
like

42: Merged feature foo
    41.3: bugfix in implementation of foo
    41.2: added NEWS entry
    41.1: implement foo
41: Merged feature bar
    ...
    ...

So, you can get a global view of history following mainline revisions,
and go into details when walking through merged revisions. The bzr
people usually like this distinction.

There are drawbacks though. One of them is that this pushes people
towards a flow where the mainline is different from other branches. If
you don't, then the hierarchical view of bzr will look like garbage,
you'll see some "keep in sync with upstream" commits in the middle of
mainline, ... People like Torvalds find this unacceptable.

So, asking whether bzr does the right thing is like asking whether
Emacs is better than vim. One is obviously better than the other, and
everybody thinking a different way has to be plain stupid, but people
still didn't agree on which is which ;-).

-- 
Matthieu