Getting started with bzr-svn (was Re: bzr-svn and subversion revisions)

[John Szakmeister]

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 4:03 AM, Russel
Winder<russel.winder at concertant.com> wrote:
[snip]
> I think this echos what is going to happen over the short and medium
> term.  Many organizations will switch to Bazaar, Mercurial or Git, but
> the vast majority will need to keep their Subversion repositories as the
> master.

Definitely.

[snip]
>> I'm a bit hesitant to start using bzr as an svn client for our company
>> svn repo, without a bit more documentation to guide me.   And I have
>> less time than I'd like to stumble through it myself.
>
> The problem here is that in reality there is no special documentation.
> the whole point of bzr-svn is that it makes a Subversion repository look
> like a Bazaar branch.  You just use Bazaar commands as (well) documented
> across the website.  Unlike Git which has special commands, Bazaar has
> no special commands for dealing with Subversion.

That is the beauty of the bzr-svn plugin (which I *love*).
Unfortunately, there isn't a complete mapping of Subversion into
Bazaar.  For instance, if I introduce files on my Bazaar branch, I
can't set file properties (svn:eol-style, svn:mime-type, etc).  You
also need to be careful about pushing into the mainline.  bzr-svn's
push behavior can be rather unfriendly if you aren't rebasing your
branch before pushing.  For instance, we like to review commits to our
SVN repo.  But the commit reordering that Bazaar and bzr-svn does,
makes that difficult, and it's frightening for svn users to see
"Copied /trunk r123".  Also, the commit reordering makes it harder to
cherry pick revisions in SVN, because the commit re-ordering changes
when a particular rev was introduced on trunk versus when we branched
our stable line.  We ran into that a couple times when I was not so
careful.

I would also like to see so beefier documentation, and I'd be willing
to contribute to that.  I, personally, haven't explored everything
with bzr-svn yet (I have done an import, haven't tried tagging
branches, or teaching bzr-svn about some of our more awkward
repository layouts).  But I have been using it nearly everyday for 9
months.

[snip]
> I have a book chapter but it isn't ready for publication yet.

Sweet!

[snip]
> The beauty of bzr-svn is that you can do DVCS immediately without having
> to stop using Subversion.  The change from CVCS to DVCS becomes both a
> revolution and an incremental change.

Even if you don't ultimately convert, it's still very useful for
examining history and is a rather nice front end to Subversion.  I
highly recommend using the QBzr plugin.  I'm a command line guy, but
it's nice to have the power of a well thought out GUI when I need it.
:-)

-John