guile-gnome bzr branches, somewhat experimental

[Andy Wingo]

Hey all,

After looking at a number of version control systems, I've gone ahead
and converted all of the old GNU Arch archives over to Bazaar (bzr),
http://bazaar-vcs.org/. I think you'll find it's quite pleasant to work
with. Here I'll paste in a section of HACKING:

\begin{snip}
We use Bazaar
=============

Bazaar (http://bazaar-vcs.org/) is a source management tool that is
particularly well-suited to modular, decentralized hacking. It is what
we use to manage our code.

The canonical source for guile-gnome is our bzr archive, which can be
retrieved as:

   $ bzr get http://arch.gna.org/guile-gnome/bzr/pkg guile-gnome

guile-gnome is developed as a set of modular source packages; the above
command just checks out the wrapper module. The set of packages that can
be built is given in the PACKAGES file in the toplevel source directory.
To configure the directory you just fetched as guile-gnome-platform, try
the following script:

   $ cd guile-gnome
   $ scripts/get-packages guile-gnome-platform

That will check out the GNOME platform modules into the guile-gnome/
directory. At that point you can run `./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr &&
make' just like any normal project.

After hacking, you can run the `push-packages' script to publish your
code.

  $ scripts/push-packages sftp://address@hidden/path/to/directory

Later, to update from the guile-gnome's canonical archive, you can do
the following:

  $ scripts/pull-packages

Note that Bazaar, sometimes known as bzr, is very different from baz,
which was essentially the same as GNU arch, which we used before.
\end{snip}

(Do see http://bazaar-vcs.org/ for more bazaar info.)

I chose bzr because of their focus on the user experience, as well as
for easy migration from baz archives. Darcs was really tempting and
beautiful, but I think that it would be more difficult from a workflow
perspective. The extra pull/fetch stages are an evil necessity in
current bzr, because it doesn't have something nice like svn:externals.

When making the merge, I took the address@hidden
archive, imported it using the baz-import plugin in bzrtools, and then
merged in changes from address@hidden and from a branch I
used on my laptop. I then had to fix up the pkg module to purge the
ghost of tla. I think you will find that branch is quite up-to-date, but
is still missing merges from the list. The repo should build fine; do
let me know if it doesn't build.

So give it a shot, lemme know what you think. I find bzr to be
refreshingly easy. I hope you do too. It should even work on windows,
which would be nice to support at some point.

Feedback welcome!

Regards,

Andy.
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