VCS comparison table

[James Henstridge]

On 17/10/06, Sean <seanlkml at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> > - - you can use a checkout to maintain a local mirror of a read-only
> >   branch (I do this with http://bazaar-vcs.com/bzr/bzr.dev).
>
> I'm not sure what you mean here.  A bzr checkout doesn't have any history
> does it?  So it's not a mirror of a branch, but just a checkout of the
> branch head?

There are two forms of checkout: a normal checkout which contains the
complete history of the branch, and a lightweight checkout, which just
has a pointer back to the original location of the history.

In both cases, a "bzr commit" invocation will commit changes to the
remote location.  In general, you only want to use a lightweight
checkout when there is a fast reliably connection to the branch (e.g.
if it is on the local file system, or local network).

Aaron would be talking about a normal (heavyweight) checkout here.
With a heavyweight checkout, you can do pretty much anything without
access to the branch.  In contrast, almost all operations on a
lightweight checkout need access to the branch.

James.