Evaluating Bazaar in a CVS environment.

[Neil Martinsen-Burrell]

Andy Walker <walkeraj <at> gmail.com> writes:

> > Right, you use "bzr switch" to change the branch the checkout is
> > associated with. It will carry across uncommitted changes (by design, so
> > if you did a fix in the wrong location, you can switch and commit it in
> > the right place.) Useful when you realize you just started a new bugfix.
> > 
> > So you have to take some care when switching with uncommitted changes.
> > (Sometimes you might go to switch not realizing that you didn't commit yet.)
> 
> So, in this environment, each time I create a new branch, will Bazaar be
> creating empty directories for each branch's .bzr directory to live in?

That is correct, although new branches made inside a shared repository are
*extremely* space efficient.  All of the revision information that is common
between the branches is stored only once.  For example, I have a shared
repository in ~/src/bzr that I use to do Bazaar related development.  There is a
pristine branch of Bazaar's development version there at ~/src/bzr/bzr.dev and
if I were using John's single working copy approach, I could make as many
branches as I wanted at approximately 260 KB per branch.  I currently go ahead
and make full tree-containing branches for every bugfix I do, but John's recent
discussion of the usefulness of `bzr switch` for him has been compelling.

-Neil