Evaluating Bazaar in a CVS environment.

[Andy Walker]

John Arbash Meinel <john <at> arbash-meinel.com> writes:

There are a few things to consider when switching to bzr.
> 
> 1) Do you really want to check out the whole thing at once? Bazaar
> generally works with each branch as a logical "project". I know usually
> for CVS/SVN you might have multiple projects all grouped together. If
> you have logical groupings, it is almost always a better fit to Bazaar
> (and really any DVCS) to split it up.
> 

Splitting things up into logical units is always a good idea, and we definitely
do this to an extent in the directory tree itself.  That being said, a lot of
the work I do (even if it is in a particular directory) would still involve
files from other "projects".  Let's say the large overarching product is called
"Websuite", and I need to make changes to the "Spreadsheet" project.  This whole
product is localized, so if I need to make any changes to display verbiage, I
would need to alter files in the higher-up Websuite/Localization
project-directory in order to reflect this.  I would also need to alter certain
template files which may or may not be specific to Websuite/Spreadsheet.  They
might be in Websuite/Spreadsheet/Templates , but they might also be in
Websuite/Templates.  If I'm understanding you correctly, I would need to make
separate branches for Spreadsheet, Templates and Localization.  It would be nice
to be able to connect these branches into one logical unit representing the one
particular bug or feature that I'm fixing.

> 2) If your working tree is large, and you want lots of branches, you
> probably want to look into using a lightweight checkout, and a tree-less
> repository, which I'll describe more later.

If I understand lightweight checkout correctly, this still creates a copy of
every file in that branch which seems kind of wasteful to me, especially if I'm
only altering four or five files spread across directories in this tree.  Again,
this is where grouping of branches would come in handy.