Describe your workflow

[Neil Martinsen-Burrell]

Paul Hummer <paul.hummer <at> canonical.com> writes:

> Aaron and I were chatting about
> shared repositories the other day, which just triggered a discussion
> with Tim about his workflow.  I'm curious to know other's workflows
> using bazaar as the VCS so that I can find something that might work
> better for me.  
>   - How are your folders laid out?  
>   - Do you use lightweight checkouts?  
>   - What plugins could you not live without it?

For my bzr hacking, I've got nothing special.  A shared repository on my laptop
at ~/src/bzr with a mirror of bzr.dev at ~/src/bzr/bzr.dev.  I usually do::

bzr branch bzr.dev bugfix 
cd bugfix
#hack
bzr send -o ~/bugfix.patch ../bzr.dev

For my other work, I work on separate laptops, desktops, lab machines, etc. so I
keep a central server and use a mix of heavyweight and lightweight checkouts. 
The setup on the central server mimics that of a multipurpose Subversion
repository that preceeded it.  I used to just checkout subdirectories of the
subversion repository, e.g. doc/papers/vortex_merger, but when I moved to
Bazaar, which requires checking out whole trees, I switched to a branch for each
project, e.g. vortex_merger which lives on the server at
bzr+ssh://server/home/neil/repo/doc/papers/vortex_merger.  Since I often branch
one paper to write another (is that ethical?) /home/neil/doc/papers is a shared
repository on the server.

I used to use lightweight checkouts on machines that were on the same internal
network with the server, but unreliable servers and networks led me to switch to
heavyweight checkouts.  It was very helpful to be able to say "The network's
down.  I'll `bzr unbind` and keep committing." rather than "The network's down.
 Guess I can't do any work today."

The only thing that I thought I would miss about Subversion when I switched to
Bazaar was that I would lose the history between branches for files that I
copied from other branches, e.g. "I need a Makefile for TeX.  I used one over in
doc/papers/other_one, I'll just `svn cp URL/doc/papers/other_one/Makefile .`". 
But in fact, as I am usually the only person working on my stuff, I rarely need
to track things back in time.  My number one need for version control is
recovery of known-good versions of a single project and Bazaar has never let me
down there.

-Neil