Whose distributed VCS is the most distributed?

[John Goerzen]

On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 04:54:40AM +0200, Adeodato Simó wrote:

Thanks for the note, Adeodato.

I posted this update to the article:

  I got an e-mail explaining how to get the individual patch diffs out of
  bzr. This will work only for "regular", non-cherry-picked merges, and
  requires some manual effort.

  You'll need to run bzr log, and find the patch IDs (these are the long
  hex numbers on the "merged:" line) of the changeset you're interested
  in, plus the changeset immediately before it on the same branch (which
  may not be on the same patch and may not be obvious at all on busy
  projects.) Then, run bzr diff -r
  revid:old-revid-string..new-revid-string.

  I think this procedure really stinks, though, since it requires people
  to manually find previous commits from the same branch in the log.

> The history is certainly preserved; at least, you can access the
> individual commits if you so wish, by specifying the full revision-id of
> the changeset you'd like to acess to.

Well, not just that (I tried it); you have to also know the revid of the
previous changeset on the same branch.  There doesn't appear to be any
nice way to discover that automatically.

> I completely agree this is clumsy, and there's much room for improvement.
> For a start, I think there are plans to introduce a -c option, so that
> there's no need to specify the revision id you want _and_ the previous
> one.

That would be a big help.

This should also be documented in darcs diff --help and the manpage.  I
really tried hard to find a way to do it, since the bzr wiki said this
was an improvement bzr made over Arch, but despite reading through the
introduction, the tutorials, and the manpage, nothing jumped out at me.

I'll also note that this doesn't help with cherry-picked merges.

Thanks,

-- John