Insights from bzr newbie coming from git

[Wouter van Heyst]

On Thu, Nov 30, 2006 at 02:44:31PM +0100, David Allouche wrote:
> > (12:18:32) AfC: quicksilver: yeah, I'm not so sure I agree with that
> > one. The git guys had a good point there. Relying on rev nos from
> > some hypothetical master | central repository is a bit vague.
> >
> > (12:41:55) AfC: ddaa: I actually like the
> > andrew at operationaldynamics.com-20061130081240-0fdbc9971670291a
> > revision ids that bzr vis shows
> 
> Git people feel uncomfortable with revnos  because they are perceived as
> "not dependable". It's interesting to see that bzr revids are actually
> lovable, and that "unique enough initial digits of the hash" is not
> universally perceived as a killer feature.

Note that AfC said he wasn't sure he would credit himself with a git
background, only having used it for a one-man-show so far.

> > (12:49:11) ddaa: AfC: that's really interesting, what do you find
> > clunky, apart from the discomfort of using revnos?
> > 
> > (12:50:22) AfC: ddaa: the branch thing. That's really got me stymied.
> > I think you came in at the tail end of our conversation earlier, but
> > there's one behaviour that git encouraged that I'm now kinda in the
> > zone for and really really fighting at the moment, and that's
> > switching a given checkout between various branches "in-place"
> 
> Switch is cool. But bzr requirement to have separate branches (and
> likely a repository as well) makes it hard to use. Multi-heads would
> make it possible to combine the efficiency of switch with the simplicity
> of standalone branches.
> 
> When we have tags, we might provide multi-heads as "magic tags", that go
> forward with commits. Was this discussed before?

git branches are just pointers into the DAG iirc. We should be able to
get rather close with tags.

...

> The lack of discoverability of revspecs has already been discussed to
> death and back. But it has not been fixed yet. In 0.13.0candidate1 the
> help of merge and branch still does not hint of the ability to identify
> revisions by revids.

0.13rc1 has `bzr help topics` and `bzr help revisionspec`. I'm not sure
how to point at those, _every_ command taking a revision argument can
make use of them. How to get this information to new users?

Wouter van Heyst
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