understanding shared repo and push

[Davis, Jacob]

 > -----Original Message-----
> From: Erik Bågfors [mailto:zindar at gmail.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2006 12:09 PM
> To: Davis, Jacob
> Cc: Wouter van Heyst; bazaar-ng at lists.canonical.com
> Subject: Re: understanding shared repo and push
> 
> The normal setup is to have a central repo on a server, that 
> you either branch or checkout from on the client.  Then on 
> the client you run your bzr commands. (commit, pull, etc)
> 
> Can you explain to me why you would do it the other way 
> around? And work the other way (by doing commit on the server 
> and push to
> clients?)
> 
> /Erik
> 
> --
> google talk/jabber. zindar at gmail.com
> SIP-phones: sip:erik_bagfors at gizmoproject.com 
> sip:17476714687 at proxy01.sipphone.com


The method you describe is what I am used to with CVS/SVN, or any other VCS, when (in typical fashion) it is used by several users to make changes to a single set of files. 
The way I'd like to use BZR is the other way around. I want a single user to make changes to many different sets of files on remote machines. Ideally I could do this without having to log into each machine individually to execute commands. I might accomplish this by various other means but it seems like BZR has some unique features that could make it useful for what I want. It would give me a sort of centralized approach to system configuration change management without having to figure out http://www.cfengine.org/ . And since BZR supports Windows it is (hopefully) also cross-platform.

I think I am mostly there. I init a repository on each client and add all the files to it that I want to track.
Then I check out each of the client repositories into my central shared repository.
I can then make all changes to the client files form the central repository and commit them, which will update the client repositories. I still need to execute "bzr update" on the clients for the working directory to update, which is not ideal, but I do have centralized tracking of changes and if the central server is ever unreachable I can still commit changes on the clients to their local repository and update the central server later.

-Jake