Whole tree up to date before committing

[Nicholas Allen]

> The problem is that, on the project I'm talking about, there is a policy
> that requires that you can't commit changes to the master branch (trunk)
> without checking that it builds and running the test suite.
>  After
> testing your changes and re-synching your local branch with master, even
> if there are no conflicts, your code is not what you tested before, but
> something else, so you need to test again, and in the meanwhile someone
> else will push something into the master branch.
>   
The user is not required to do that with svn so why would you make them
required to do that in Bazaar? Bazaar is just making it more obvious to
the developer that there could be a problem. You could write a bash
script that just updated and committed in a loop until success if you
really want to hide this potential problem from the user and get the
exact same workflow as you have now.
> The seconds that bzr requires are not the problem, re-building and
> testing is what creates the problem.
>   
That's a requirement you're making for Bazaar and not Subversion.
> But now that you mention it: on very large projects with lots of
> developers (think on KDE) even the short time bzr requires may be a
> problem. On that scenario, be sure to write your commit message before
> updating your local branch, because if you are a slow typist, maybe your
> commit window is gone when you finish :-)
>
>   
Bazaar would not have all KDE projects in one branch. Instead you would
have a branch for each project. With subversion they don't do this
because it's a PITA to setup that way. But each project having its own
branch is a more sensible way of working.

Nick