Questions regarding large projects

[Iwan Vosloo]

Hi there,

I am working on projects that will in time become quite large, and
have just switched to bazaar-ng (0.7) from GNUarch.  (So, I'm quite
familiar with arch, but have only an RTFM understanding of bazaar-ng.)


I have questions regarding the running of larger projects using
bazaar, and thought I'd rather dump them here instead of just doing my
own thing.

1) What are the thoughts out there regarding structuring a large project
   managed by bazaar into smaller sub-projects?  Is the current
   thinking that you'd just make each sub-project a bazaar project on
   its own?

2) The other question is regarding the "correct" usage of branches...

   Say you have a main repository on the web which you use to
   coordinate and distribute your code.  Developers create local
   branches, on remote machines. (A star-topology.)

   a) I suppose that http access is fine for giving read-only access,
   b) and that the you can give sftp (or similar) access to the
      developers you want allow to merge their stuff back into the main
      archive.
  
   (I'm assuming in the below that branches kind-of work like in
   arch:) 

   c) How do you think branch numbering should work here: using
   arch, one scheme is to create an 0.1 branch on the main server, and
   also, (say) an 0.1.1 branch.  Then developers can check out a
   version of 0.1.1 and contribute their changes back to the main
   server's 0.1.1 branch.  Say it's been decided to stop work on 0.1.1,
   you somehow freeze that branch and merge it into 0.1 (on the main
   repository).  You also create the 0.1.2 branch from the new 0.1
   version where you start working on version 0.1.2, etc.

   In other words, each x.x.x branch represents where developers are
   currently working towards the x.x.x version of the project.  When
   that version is released, you create a new branch for the new
   version you'll be working towards.  Bugfixes to older versions of
   the project can still be appended to their (largely inactive) old
   branches.


-i