Bazaar as a client to existing Subversion repositories

[Ben Finney]

Russel Winder <russel.winder at concertant.com> writes:

> On Sat, 2008-08-09 at 19:33 +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
> > I'm very much desirous of not doing history-altering changes, so
> > procedures involving 'rebase' aren't an option I'm interested in.
> > Thanks for clarifying.
> 
> It is not as black and white as that. The question is whether the
> Subversion repository history or the Bazaar branch history is the
> master. If the Subversion repository history is the master and must
> not be altered then rebase and dpush in Bazaar are exactly the right
> thing to do since the Bazaar branch history must be changed to match
> the Subversion repository history. Rebasing is the right thing to do
> in this case. This is why Git does things the way it does, and now
> Bazaar has this same capability.

Thanks for illustrating these points. I don't yet know what to think,
but at least I am aware it's not as simple as I previously thought.

> > That's yet another reason to avoid that option then. For me, one
> > of the primary reasons to use Bazaar is ease of branching and
> > sensible merging of local and remote branches. If I lose that,
> > Bazaar is significantly less useful as a client to the repository.
[…]
> In this situation, I think Git is probably better simply because of
> the different way it manages branches, revisions and changesets.

That's a sad statement. I would have expected that Bazaar, with its
deliberate emphasis on abstracted back-ends, would be able to handle
the situation *better* than Git.

Not that I disbelieve you; I just feel like I've backed the wrong
horse, somehow.

-- 
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Ben Finney