Simplified Tutorial

[John Arbash Meinel]

Matthew D. Fuller wrote:
> On Fri, May 05, 2006 at 09:18:08PM +0200 I heard the voice of
> Erik B?gfors, and lo! it spake thus:
>> I played around for about 10 min with a "using bzr in a centralized
>> fashion for svn/cvs users"-tutorial.
> 
> I approached this problem a little while back with
> <http://bazaar-vcs.org/MatthewFuller/CVSIntro>.  I got a bit busy
> before I got the third part written, and didn't bother trying to free
> up any immense amount of time for it, because 0.8 was right around the
> corner and would require reworking it anyway, so might as well wait
> 'till then   ;p
> 
> The biggest problem I had with existing "-for-CVS-users" and the like
> tutorials is that they had nothing to do with using bzr if you're used
> to CVS; they were all about "DVCS concepts for CVCS users", which is a
> very different thing.  And the other existing tutorials all wander off
> into realms of doing the branching and merging, which is all rubbish
> from the standpoint of someone who's already comfortably using CVS.

I think having a minimal document, just to get people started, and
working the way they are used to working can be a great document. We've
worked pretty hard to allow different use models. To the point that if
people *really* want cvs style, they can use 'checkout --lightweight'. I
 think if we want to make that workflow a little bit better, we could
save a local copy of just the basis tree. So that doing "bzr st"
wouldn't have to connect to the remote machine.

As one step higher they can just use "bzr checkout", which we really
should have aliased to "bzr co".

And if we want to make everything fast for them, simply doing:

bzr init-repo ~

Then all branches that they create will use the shared storage in their
home directory. Kind of a giant cache. Though we don't really support
expiring things from the cache, so size *might* become an issue.

> 
> I don't have any use for branching in most of my CVS use.  I don't
> even have multiple PEOPLE involved in most of my CVS use; most of it
> is just me, working on just one thing with just one mainline.  That's
> the basis of the BzrSimple portion of my doc; just you, just one set
> of files, no branching, slicing, dicing, pushing, pulling, merging or
> ANY of that external complication.  And when you wander off into that,
> people who by and large don't care about it right now _will_ wander
> off.  As I say in the BzrSimple page:
> 
>     There's a line between "show how to use bzr" and "show what bzr
>     can do". I propose to ignore the latter here, in favor of the
>     former.
> 
> 
> I'm still idly hoping to get time to finish and update it post 0.8.

Well, I used branches with CVS, but I know a lot of people didn't.

I would probably recommend switching your focus from standalone
branches, into heavy checkouts with a remote repository. Simply because
that means changes are saved in more places than just the working directory.
However, I do understand that it is more complicated. And if you feel
that just using standalone branches makes things simpler to explain and
get people using, I'm okay with that.

So kudos for writing up some simplified stuff, just to get people going.
They can always grow into more.

John
=:->


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