Re: bzr repository ready?

[Karl Fogel]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
> Also, would it be possible to publish a short ``howto'' cookbook for
> those who are not familiar enough with bzr?  A DVCS has more different
> workflows than CVS and its ilk, so it would be good if active
> developers could know up front how to set up and how to use the
> workflow that best fits their needs, without having to read lots of
> unnecessary documentation and finding that out by trial and error.  At
> least the following important workflows come to mind:
>
>  . Development on the trunk -- sync with the main repository, make
>    changes, submit them back to the repository.
>
>  . Development on a release branch -- same as above, except that
>    changes go to a branch.
>
>  . Development on a public branch -- this would include more merges
>    from and to the trunk, and otherwise is like the second bullet
>    above.
>
>  . Development on a private branch.
>
> (Maybe there are more -- I have no real experience with a DVCS, so I
> don't know.)

My sympathies -- I came to bzr from the centralized-vc world too.  It's
actually not that hard though.  You just have to separate the concept of
"checkpoint my work" from the concept of "publish my work".  In
centralized vc, these are unified in the "commit" command.  In Bazaar,
"commit" means "checkpoint" and "push" means "publish" (roughly speaking).

I've already written http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BzrForEmacsDevs.
My instinct is to start with that, and then answer questions here as as
people have them, rather than write lots more text only to discover that
it doesn't answer the questions that actually come up.

> For each one of these, it would be enough to point to the relevant
> sections of the existing bzr docs, no need to rewrite them, unless
> some of the issues are mal-documented.

The above has a link to the Bazaar Users Guide, and other things.

> In addition, some guidelines for selecting the right version of bzr
> that should be installed, and if there are more than one that's
> suitable, a short list of advantages and disadvantages of each of
> them.

A version recommendation is already at the above link.

> Finally, some guidance for users on Windows, if there are any issues
> that need special attention (EOL format comes to mind, as well as
> binary files, but maybe there's more).

That I can't help with (Windows-free since 1992), but there are plenty
of Bazaar Windows users and an active user community in general.  See
http://bazaar-vcs.org/ for details.

-Karl