bzr-pipeline, installers and explorer

[A. S. Budden]

2009/11/20 Ian Clatworthy <ian.clatworthy at canonical.com>:
[snip]
> For more information on bzr-pipeline, see:
>
> * http://bazaar-vcs.org/BzrPipeline
> * http://theironlion.net/tag/bzr-pipelines/
[snip]

I'd not come across pipelines before, but I must say that they look
extremely useful and they'd fit quite well with the way I work.  Out
of interest, can they be used with heavyweight checkouts?  The working
model seems quite similar to the way I work, but it explicitly states
that it's designed for use with lightweight checkouts only.  I suspect
this is to do with the distributed feature branch idea of having a
lightweight checkout of a local directory.  The way we tend to work is
to have a folder on our server:

F:/VCS/ProjectCategory/ProjectName

that is a shared repository.  Inside this folder is a bunch of
branches, one called "trunk" and the others generally named
feature-something-or-other (where something-or-other changes obviously
- not as nice as feature/something-or-other, but works better with
short switch commands).  I then work on a local folder with a
heavyweight checkout and use:

switch -b feature-xyz
# hack hack hack, commit, commit, commit
switch trunk
    and
merge F:/VCS/ProjectCategory/ProjectName/feature-xyz

to go back and forth between the branches.

I like the heavyweight checkout (as opposed to lightweight) as we have
occasional network problems or the occasional need to work on a train
or whatever and I can do local commits and then send them back to the
(regularly backed-up) server when I'm back online.

Is it possible to use pipelines (or looms for that matter) with this
working model?  It would be really nice to have a chain of feature
branches but not have to remember the order in which the branching
occurred when merging.  It would also be nice to be able to go back to
trunk, start a new feature, finish it and then send those changes up
through another set of feature branches.

Thanks,

Al

-- 
http://sites.google.com/site/abudden