Roadmap for Bazaar...

[Barry Warsaw]

On Sep 21, 2010, at 07:05 AM, John Szakmeister wrote:

>  * Nested trees.  Lots of folks have big projects, and they're
>currently using SVN's externals (which I loathe).  Unfortunately,
>without this feature, folks don't know a good way to organize their
>tree.  Oh, and somewhat related to this, I think svn:revno should pick
>the most recent version of a branch if it wasn't modified in revno...
>just like SVN does.  Otherwise, nested trees aren't as useful against
>SVN repositories (about half the ones I work against would be broken).

I suspect nested trees will also be part of the story for UDD.  Imagine the
upstream branch (pinned to a revno or tag) combined with a packaging branch
via nesting, in a loom thread.  This would probably give a nice work flow both
for doing UDD and for exporting just the packaging changes to Debian for
example.

>  * Revision ids that are easier to reference than Bazaar's revision
>ids.  An issue that I've been running into a lot with newbies is the
>fact that revision numbers can change easily.  Bazaar won't think
>twice about re-ordering the mainline, especially if your pushing back
>to a branch, and you've merged the tip of that branch in it already:
>   bzr branch <main> <work>
>   # Hack, hack on work
>   bzr merge :parent # into <work>
>   bzr push :parent
>
>It'd be nice if Bazaar didn't allow that push by default (something
>that I think you guys have talked about).  But if you aren't going to
>do that, then I think it's a good idea to have revision ids that you
>can refer to easily that don't change.  You have the latter, but they
>aren't easy to refer to.

Hmm.  I often work this way, at least for projects where I'm the main or sole
contributor.  I find it a bit more convenient than merging the work branch
back into trunk and then pushing the trunk.  The difference in artifacts
doesn't bother me in those cases.  While I could probably change the way I
work if Bazaar decided to disallow that for improved user experience, I would
like a configuration variable to re-enable it.

>I hope you don't mind the criticism.  I've been doing a lot of
>educating lately (writing a class for Bazaar and teaching folks in our
>company) and thought I'd share the pain points.  We like Bazaar, and
>especially the QBzr plugin, but feel it could be easier.

Definitely!  It always amazes me to realize how much pain I've forgotten once
I'm proficient with any particular tool.  It's really helpful to capture those
pain points when you start out, or when you rediscover them by teaching others.

-Barry
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