A not so idle thought

[Paul Moore]

2008/10/13 Talden <talden at gmail.com>:
>>> Local lightweight checkouts can also be a useful tool for very quick
>>> experiments.
>
>> I never got used to these. Surely the fact that commits happen against
>> the master means that they are *not* useful unless you are happy to do
>> your whole experiment without committing?
>
> .../sharedrepo/
>   master/       (tree-less mirror of master branch)
>   b1/           (tree-less local branch of master)
>
> .../somewhere/else/b1   (lightweight checkout of .../sharedrepo/b1)
>
> Yes your commits on the checkout go directly to the branch, but that
> is your branch still.  You have a single working-tree, a single repo
> of revisions and still have your own local branch.

Thanks. I understood this, I just don't see that as "quick". Suppose I
have a branch of the (remote) master, and let's be charitable and
suppose I've already got it in a shared repo C:\Bzr. (Would I have a
single shared repo for all my local branches, Python, Bazaar, etc etc?
I'm not sure - maybe there's another directory level in there, but
that's a distraction).

Suppose I'm in C:\Data (where I do all my local work) and I want to
try out a quick idea on Python. Sequence of events:

cd C:\Bzr
bzr branch python python-myhack
cd C:\Data
bzr checkout --lightweight C:\Bzr\python-myhack
cd python-myhack

That's more than I'd like to do. And cleaning up afterwards involves
deleting 2 directories. Oh, and it relies on C:\Bzr being a --no-trees
shared repo, otherwise there's time wasted creating an unnecessary
working tree.

Maybe I'm disorganised and sloppy, but that seems far less reasonable than

hg clone C:\HG\python python-myhack
cd python-myhack
... hack, hack
cd ..
rd /s/q python-myhack

But we're now well off the topic, and into "which DVCS is better"
arguments, which aren't really appropriate on this list anyway, so
I'll stop here.

Thanks for the explanation, though. It's good to review these things
occasionally, especially with a project as fast-moving as Bazaar!

Paul