A not so idle thought

[Russel Winder]

The single biggest difference between Bazaar on the one hand and
Mercurial and Git on the other, is that Bazaar is about self-standing
branches and Mercurial and Git are about having branches within a single
repository.  In all the presentations and debates over the next year or
two, this is going to be the central issue.

I definitely come from the Bazaar end of things -- all the branches are
on the filestore with working trees and I can use meld, diff, shell
scripts, python scripts to do things with the branches.  With Mercurial
and Git you are either reliant on making inappropriate copies or the
internal tools, less adaptive.

However, one thing I find amazingly useful in Git (I haven't used
Mercurial enough yet) is the ease with which I can see where all the
branches, both local and remote, are.  cf. the gitk presentation.  I can
have arbitrary numbers of Git branches monitored (but only one
Subversion repository).  This makes branch management really rather
straightforward.

Clearly in a Bazaar context there is a problem using standalone
branches, exactly because they are standalone.  Also of course a branch
can have just one parent and one push branch recorded (which is a
problem in my book, Git seems to have this more right just now.

In a shared repository though we have the same model as Mercurial and
Git, lots of local branches in a single repository.  Have I just missed
the gitk-like tool of Bazaar for managing these branches?  If I haven't
I wonder if putting it on the road map a good move?  Should Olive-GTK be
able to handle multiple branches at once? (At least in a shared
repository.)  Should branches have more than one push branch recorded?

There are many other questions but this seems like a long enough email
for now.

Thanks.
-- 
Russel.
====================================================
Dr Russel Winder                 Partner

Concertant LLP                   t: +44 20 7585 2200, +44 20 7193 9203
41 Buckmaster Road,              f: +44 8700 516 084
London SW11 1EN, UK.             m: +44 7770 465 077
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