Whole tree up to date before committing

[Neil Martinsen-Burrell]

On 2009-10-22 12:54 , John Szakmeister wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 12:29 PM, John Arbash Meinel
> <john at arbash-meinel.com>  wrote:
> [snip]
>> If you have a large amount of code with unrelated things, the
>> recommendation is to split that up into separate projects (with their
>> own collection of branches). With clearly defined boundaries of what
>> files should stay synchronized. (If it is truly unrelated, then it
>> should be in a different branch.)
>>
>> I realize that the lack of 'svn:externals' complicates this, since after
>> splitting there isn't a simple 'give me everything' command. Though the
>> 'scmproj' plugin provides a decent set of tools for handling things in a
>> fashion similar to 'svn:externals'.
>
> Right now, I see the lack of nested trees as being the biggest
> stumbling block to Bazaar in our workplace.  We don't like externals,
> but unfortunately, our customers do.  Mercurial has this support now.
> It'd be really nice to get a similar facility into Bazaar.  I haven't
> tried scmproj yet, but I'm frightened of trying to explain it to 30
> people, much less 300.  It's the only way I see big projects coming
> together smoothly.

I would agree with John.  I followed Subversion development closely 
before I came to Bazaar, and externals is one of the most-asked-about 
features on their mailing lists.  The concept of embedding versioned 
trees within other versioned trees is a significant boon for many 
software projects.  I don't know what sort of "strategic" planning for 
the Bazaar 2.0 cycle has happened, but I hope that nested trees come 
high up on that list.

One of the other questions that comes up frequently on the Subversion 
mailing list is "How can I automatically update a remote working copy 
with the latest version of my project?" which led me to write my first 
Bazaar plugin, bzr-automirror.  I imagine that there is more 
feature-stealing that we can do by keeping an eye on what features are 
being discussed on that and similar mailing lists.  Server 
administration issues including access control and shallow checkouts are 
two other features that often come (came) up at Subversion-users.

-Neil