bzr-eclipse problem

[Andrew Cowie]

On Fri, 2010-02-05 at 22:10 +0000, James Mansion wrote:
> I've gone back to svn for my Java stuff for the moment - refactoring 
> moves files around and its too painful not to have the IDE drive the VCS 
> moves.

This is indeed the quintessential use case. You *can* do this with
Bazaar, but its support for this scenario is somewhat forced.

[in that most of the Bazaar hackers live in a one-directory-per-Branch
world of python where it's perfectly alright to have 10s or 100s of
Working Tree checkouts. So cool, the best way to use Bazaar is with a
lots of branches and no problem because you can just go an ./bzr there.
That doesn't fly for the kernel hackers because of disk space and not
wanting to rebuild an entire kernel just because you changed branches,
and it doesn't fly for Java people because they can configure one *and
only* one instance of a project (with it's given family of classes) in
an IDE like Eclipse (otherwise you end up with Eclipse thinking it has
10s or 100s of versions of a each class, and you're screwed]

++

The way we suggest people hacking on our project in java-gnome is the
sequence described at the top of:
http://java-gnome.sourceforge.net/4.0/HACKING.html

This setup gives you a ~/workspace/project-name place where you can do:

$ bzr switch other-branch

and in combination with:

$ bzr mv --auto

things are somewhat better. It's all still very cumbersome compared to
Git, but it's ok if you're careful to work within the limitations of
this setup.

The problem isn't Bazaar supporting this; clearly it does. The grounds I
would cite for considering this worthy of improvement are 

a) it seems a bit of an afterthought / bolted on the side. It wasn't
what bzr was for originally, and it still seems a bit of a fringe use
case; and

b) it's a bit fragile, because if you do any of a number of perfectly
normal bzr commands you can easily screw up your setup.

AfC
Sydney


[at the risk of sounding like a broken record, since I've cited this URL
on bazaar-list before. There are many ways to do things, of course]

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