One big project with multiple small projects

[Nicholas Allen]

I have also been wanting something like this for a long time. There has 
been some work on nested branches but it is not yet stable. IMO this is 
the most important feature that bzr currently lacks. I think it's even 
more important than the performance work that is being done. bzr should 
be a great vcs for open source developers but open source development by 
nature is very modular. I hope the bzr developers will put some serious 
effort into this soon.

I am considering switching to Mercurial in the meantime as I hear it has 
something like this...

Cheers,

Nick

Lionel Dricot wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm starting one big project which consist of several independant 
> modules that will talk over D-BUS. I'm wondering how I can set a bzr 
> repository for it.
>
> Some background :
> - Each module will have a different maintener (even if a maintener can 
> have multiple module)
> - Some modules are existing Open Source application that already use 
> bzr for their upstream development.
> - There should be a central point which handle all the modules (like a 
> shell script that will start them all)
> - The whole project should be easily installable on a freshly 
> installed computer (so we want to avoid a big howto which implies 
> doing 17 bzr branch)
>
> Solution that I see :
>
> 1) Having a big bzr repository that will handle the whole project
> + Easy to set up and to install on a new computer : bzr branch and you 
> are done
> - Mainteners are maybe not interested in all other modules
> - Upstream sync becomes  a nightmare. It means that we take an 
> existing project and put it in our own VCS which I want to avoid at 
> all costs.
>
> 2) Having a bzr repository for each project
> + Easy to set up for each module maintener
> + Easy upstream synchronization
> - A nightmare to install on a new computer
> - In order to be sure all the modules are up to date, you have to run 
> a lot of bzr command
>
> With SVN, I would put all in one big repository, allowing mainteners 
> to only checkout a subrepository and maybe using svn external for 
> upstream projects. But I don't see how I can do something similar with 
> bzr.
>
> Any suggestion is appreciated,
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Lionel