Help promoting Bazaar

[Daniel Carrera]

Hi Ben,

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 12:21 PM, Ben Finney <ben+bazaar at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
>> 1. How do you interactively select changes to commit, in the style of
>> "darcs record", "hg record" and "git add --patch"?
>
> It seems quite backward, to me, that one would want to commit an
> untested subset of the changes in the working tree. Unlike those
> systems, Bazaar encourages getting the working tree into a state fit for
> committing, so that it can be tested *as is* before the commit.

Well, best not judge Hg and Git based on my post. I suspect that most
Hg and Git users would agree with you here. My workflow habits come
from Darcs, not Hg or Git. Hg and Git both offer something like "darcs
record", but this is not the standard workflow in either.

My current work is limited to websites and documentation, so your
comment about testing are less applicable.


>> 2. Does "bzr branch Foo" do something similar to what it does in
>> Mercurial and Git? i.e. make a new branch in the current repository,
>> so you can switch between them with something like "bzr update" or
>> "bzr checkout"?
>
> No. Bazaar by default uses the filesystem to distinguish branches; each
> branch occupies a separate directory with its own working tree (if any).
> The gack that a bunch of branches are subdirectories of a repository is
> what causes them to be “in” that repository.

I didn't understand your last sentence. I probably don't fully
understand the Bazaar notion of repository vs branch. But I'm
learning. I now know that Bazaar puts each branch in a separate
directory.

> I believe there is a plug-in to make multiple branches within a single
> directory, like the Mercurial and Git model.

I don't care terribly about one model or the other. I just want to
document Bazaar in an accurate and helpful way for our visitors.


>> Btw, what's the difference between "update" and "checkout"?.
>
> I'm not sure why you'd think they are to be confused; perhaps you're
> thinking of some other pair of commands?

The documentation for "update" and "checkout" looked similar. I am
also influenced by Mercurial where the two are synonyms. Also, in Git,
I think "checkout" seems to do what "bzr update" does. So there is
room for confusion for a user coming from those systems.


> ‘bzr update’ updates the state of the working tree from the repository:
> it modifies the files in the working tree so that all the revisions from
> the repository are applied.
>
> (Hmm, the help for update doesn't really make that very clear. It jumps
> straight into talking about a merge, which doesn't get the basic point
> across very well IMO.)
>
> ‘bzr checkout’ makes a new checkout of an existing branch. You might
> find ‘bzr help checkouts’ useful.

Please don't use the word checkout to explain the command checkout.
The documentation didn't help me a lot because it also used the word
"checkout". Looking at the documentation, it now seems to me that
"checkout" does something very similar to "branch". Am I right?


> I have no idea what ‘dpush’ is supposed to mean; every time it's
> explained to me I don't see why that name was chosen, and I forget the
> association. I think of it as “destructive push” because it discards
> existing history (fails to propagate the actual history), which makes it
> less reliable than ‘push’. Perhaps someone who actually uses it can
> describe its purpose better.

Ok, thanks.

Daniel.
-- 
Intollerant people should be shot.