bzr questions

[John A Meinel]

Jordan Breeding wrote:
> On Wednesday, September 28, 2005, at 10:49AM, John A Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:

...

> 
> Honestly, while I understand why it happens, and know that cvs also has
> the problem I have always found the messages a little annoying.

To me it is just telling me what I did.
We already trap for the error, it is just a question of whether we 
should print it or not. (If we didn't you would get a much longer 
traceback message).

> 
> More than me finding them a little annoying (which I can deal with), I
> know that as all of the new revision control programs have started
> becoming more usable (monotone, mercurial, bzr, git, etc.) most seem to
> have started actually trying to pay attention to what most people
> actually find easy to use.
> 
> I think that monotone handles broken pipes currently, mercurial did,
> then they got broken, and now they are fixed again
> (http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2005-September/004598.html).
> 
> I think that overall while I understand why things are happening there
> might be a class of users who eventually use bzr but don't necessarily
> know a lot about shells, pipes, etc.  To those users it might seem like
> something is broken if all they did was `bzr log | less` scroll for a
> while and hit "q".  Just a thought.
> 
> Does bzr ever call out to an external merge program?

It used to rely on diff, patch, and diff3. But as of the latest release, 
all of that should be internal. The only external program is diff if you 
do "bzr diff --diff-options".

In general, we don't do fuzzy patching, so we don't need patch's 
intelligence. We do 3-way merging, but we implemented a Merge3 class 
(based around python's builtin diffutils), which works very similarly to 
diff3.

> 
> Sorry for all of the basic questions I have been asking, I only just
> started really looking into bzr (I like that it tracks directories,
> which mercurial does not).

No problem. It's actually nice to hear what a new perspective thinks. At 
least for now, where we aren't getting people saying the same things 
over and over again. But maybe that's because we are responding to the 
questions. (versus, say, Arch).

John
=:->

> 
> Jordan
> 

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