question on : "Team collaboration, distributed style" workflow

[Colin D Bennett]

On Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:32:30 +0200
"Erik Bågfors" <zindar at gmail.com> wrote:

> > On tutorial in section 6.2.5 "Merging a feature into trunk" , i
> > have to do the following actions, in my case :
> >
> > cd myrtille-0.5.15
> > bzr pull
> > bzr merge ../myrtille-fix-252329-makefile
> > (resolve any conflicts)
> > bzr commit -m "Fixed bug #252329"
> > bzr push
> >
> > If i don't make a commit before the merge. The merge do nothing.
> > And if i do the commit in my feature branch, then a commit in the
> > mainline branch. it's look like I due twice the same type of commit.
> 
> Yepp.. That's how it's done.  You'll get one commit per merge you do.
> This is a feature and not a problem. Remember that to fix a bug, you
> might make 10,15, 100 commits, but then when you merge, you have to do
> just one to get all those in.  If you just do one commit, then it
> might look like a "unneeded" commit when you merge, but it still
> provide information and conflict resolution.

I think the view provided by 'bzr viz' in the bzr-gtk plugin really
makes this easily visible.  You can see the merges between the branches.

I'd really like a higher level visualization tool, one that could show
the relationships between a projects branches.  For instance, it would
be great to be able to see diagrams like the one under "Version Tree
Diagrams" in "Streamed Lines":
http://www.cmcrossroads.com/bradapp/acme/branching/#BranchingTermsNotation

Or, something like the GCC release codeline map at the bottom of this
page:
http://gcc.gnu.org/develop.html

When I'm not interested in each commit, but I want to focus on what
branches have been merged into what other branches, it would be
extremely useful to have a project level (multi-branch) overview.

Is there anything like this?  Has anyone else thought about it?

Regards,
Colin