best way to use bazaar on windows

[Dave Compton]

Hi Rahul,

I've been using bazaar on windows for about a month now and so far am 
happy with it.  The environment I use is probably not the *best* way but 
it works reasonably well and may be of interest to you (particularly 
since you work in linux).

I use bazaar from the command line and the command line is a cygwin bash 
shell.  I almost never use the windows xp "cmd shell".  Using cygwin 
allows me to use *exactly* the same init scripts on windows and linux 
(with some conditionals inside the script) for command line work.  I 
keep these version controlled in bazaar.

The cygwin environment also comes with a version of bzr.  However, this 
version of bzr has problems (attributed to a cygwin bug) so I don't use 
it.  Here's  a launchpad bug report regarding this bug: 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bzr/+bug/181855 .  Instead, I am used the 
windows installer to install a native (non-cygwin) version of bzr.  To 
make sure I get the native version instead of the cygwin version, I 
wrote a trivial script:
------------------start----------------------
#! /bin/bash
"C:/Program Files/Bazaar/bzr.exe" "$@"
---------------------end---------------------
and put it in a windows only part of my $PATH: $HOME/bin/windows

So far it's been working well.

- Dave


Rahul Nabar wrote:
> After about a month of using Bazaar to version my scripts and config
> files on my Linux box I thought it might be a good idea to use it for
> my Windows docs too. On Linux using Bazaar was a real breeze and a
> great experience. But Bazaar isn't really written for Windows systems,
> is it?
>
> What's the best way to go about it on Windows?  I hardly do any coding
> in WinXP but was intending to use Bazaar to version Word and
> Powerpoint docs. I saw there were a couple of plugins ( Tortoisebzr  /
> Olive) etc. but many seemed in development versions. Besides the WinXP
> "command line" (if I may use the term!) is sort of iffy; so I probably
> should be using a GUI, right?
>
> Do people have suggestions / pitfalls I should be aware of? Or is it
> wise to stay away from Bazaar on Windows entirely.
>
> -Rahul
>
>