Empty directories where branches are, and how to work centrally (was Re: questions from a new bzr user)

[Robert Collins]

On Fri, 2006-05-05 at 02:48 +0200, Ramon Diaz-Uriarte wrote:
> 
> 1. I have a "central repository" in a server, and then do my work on,
> say, a laptop. Other colleagues might be doing the same. Now, I'd like
> to store my changes in the server. As my colleagues might have been
> editing the same files, I use merge, not push. However, to use merge I
> need to log into the server, and do a merge from there. Is there a way
> to do the merge (going from my laptop to the server) issuing the
> command from my laptop?
> 
> 2. I cannot find post 0.7 releases of bzrtools as the link from the
> plugins page takes me to an empty directory. Either the sources or a
> deb would be fine. I found the deb package, but it depends on an
> ubuntu package; I can force installation, and it seems to work, but I
> don't like it. Are there places/repositories I am missing?
> 
> Actually, being directed to empty repositories has happend with some
> other plugins. And for bzrk I was taken to files from late 2005
> (though for this I saw the deb package). 

Hi.

Answering in reverse order because its easier :). The 'empty'
directories are probably bzr branches: if you do 'bzr branch URL' you
should get a full copy of the code. (You can just add .bzr to the URL in
your web browser to test this). The reason for this is that pushing the
unpacked source code around for a branch takes a long time - we can't
quickly determine if a remote file has changed, and wouldn't want to
overwrite a file without merging... So we decided that we would not
write the unpacked source code when pushing over FTP or SFTP. The recent
addition of 'knits' to bzr has made our built in 'push' fast enough that
people are no longer using the 'rsync' style push, but have switched to
using a 'shared repository' to publish their branches.


For the centralised workflow we have added an optional feature that
provides built in support for shared branches.

Lets assume you have your shared branch at
sftp://example/org/srv/bzr/yourbranch


If you perform a *checkout* of this branch to your local machine, bzr
will understand that this is a shared branch, and let you know when
other people have done edits, and allow you to reconcile them locally.

Here is one way you can use this:

# Create a checkout of the shared branch
$ bzr checkout sftp://example/org/srv/bzr/yourbranch shared-branch
# Create a branch I'm going to work on
$ bzr branch shared-branch feature-X

# do some work in feature-X
$ cd feature-X
$ touch foo
$ bzr add
$ bzr commit -m 'Add foo'

# new we do a merge and publish it in the shared branch
$ cd ../shared-branch
# pickup any new work in the shared repository
$ bzr update
# now merge the changes you did in feature-X
$ bzr merge ../feature-X
# and commit them (after resolving any conflicts)
$ bzr commit -m 'Merge in feature-X'.


That last commit will commit directly to
sftp://example/org/srv/bzr/yourbranch and is multi-user safe. If another
user has committed before you did, you can just do a 'bzr update' and
then do the commit again.

Hope this helps,
Cheers,
Rob


-- 
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