Is bzr *appropriate* and *ready* for me?

[Jari Aalto]

John A Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> writes:

> Jari Aalto wrote:
>> 
>> What I meant that SVN, CVS and the like "star systems" automatically
>> handle out-of-synch problems, because the connection point to all of
>> these is the same.
>
> You might check out my 'bound-branch' version of bzr. Which should land
> soon, now that branch-formats has landed.
>
> Basically, the idea is that you still have a local branch and a central
> branch. But you "bzr bind" the local branch to the central one. Thereby
> informing it that you don't want to commit if you are out of date. (So
> you must pull/update before you can commit).
>
>> All changes are stored in central point.
>
> And, naturally, it commits the changes to the remote location on every
> commit.

Thanks, I suspected that this wasn't in bzr yet, when I wrote the
answer :-)

>> I'm not that familiar with distributed system yet (or bzr), but I
>> understood that the user must specifically "push" the changes
>> somewhere. This has to be manually repeated in every Host. Otherwise
>> the changes stay local.
>> 
>> I'm not even sure where would be the centralized push be in bzr case?
>> Can someone explain how to accomplish similar "star system"?
>> 
>>            \ | /
>>           -  o  -
>>            / | \
>> 
>> Jari 
>
> Yes, right now, you do have to run "bzr push" after "bzr commit" to put
> them in a central location. But you can just have a branch located on a
> shared access machine, that different people push to.
>
> In the future, as part of some other refactoring, we will support
> 'checkouts' which won't have a local repository. (With bound branches,
> if you are on your laptop, and get on a plane, you can 'bzr unbind' and
> keep working, with a checkout you can't do anything. You can't annotate,
> etc).
>
> The only thing that isn't in bzr right now is forcing commits to go to a
> remote location. But I've written the code to do it. (The only thing
> that prevented it going in before now is that we wanted a branch format
> bump, so that old clients wouldn't commit to the local branch, and
> violate the binding).

Excellent.

Would someone please draw some pictures on all these, since as new
user (to distributed VCS), I'm quite confused about the jargon that
swims through my eyes in this list

      - bound branches?
      - shelve?           (can't stick ths concept to anything familiar
                           like RCS, CVs, SVN ..)
      - <many other concepts>

I would lend my help to draw [1], but I don't understand enough to put
it in pictures.

Jari

[1]
few of my projects with "pictures"
http://debian.cante.net/stem
http://pm-lib.sourceforge.net/README.html