Re: patch vs. overwrite in bzr

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: address@hidden
> Cc: Bastien <address@hidden>,  Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>,  
> address@hidden,  address@hidden,  address@hidden
> Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2012 22:01:57 +0200
> 
> Bzr is okay for most things, except it lacks co-located branches

As of v2.5.0 (the latest stable release), bzr supports co-located
branches in the core, so no plugins are necessary.  (I didn't use it,
so I cannot share any experience.)

> I tried the git-bzr git plugin for a while but that didn't work too
> well because of bugs in bzr fastimport.

When did you last try that?  AFAIK, all the significant bugs are now
fixed, and in fact bzr-git is bundled with the official release.

For me, the main disadvantage of bzr-git is that the initial branch
(a.k.a. clone) command is painfully slow, because bzr needs to convert
all the git meta-data to bzr format.  (After the initial branch
creation, pulling is quite bearable.)  But other than that, its
integration with bzr is very good, and starting with bzr 2.5, you can
clone all the branches, not just master, and pull separately from each
branch.

> This workflow is pretty convenient in Git with colocated
> branches. AFAIK it is a planned feature for Bzr but it's not ready yet.

The future is here, see above.  You may wish to give it another try.

> I feel I provide less Emacs patches than I could because of this lack. I
> would be interested to know how other Emacs developers handle this
> situation. Perhaps there is something I am missing?

FWIW, I like having separate branches.  At least for Emacs, and for
the use case when the changes in the branch are significant (like what
I had for bidi), co-located branches get in the way because switching
branches needs to make a lot of changes, and requires a large build if
not a full bootstrap.  So having several branches sharing the same
tree does not gain much, and their disadvantage -- the possibility to
forget what branch is the current one and mess up -- is not worth that
gain.  YMMV, of course.