Thoughts and experiences on Bazaar & Subversion in an enterprise environment

[Matthew Gordon]

>
> Can you be more specific? What do you think is missing at the moment?
>
I mostly just wanted to say that I think bzr-svn is important. But since you
asked...

I haven't actually used svn-bzr, but I did look into the possibility of
using bzr as my svn client at work. I feel a little silly saying what I'm
about to say because, really, I just didn't look into it much. (The only
other developers who might be inclined to push for a new VCS feel that
subversion wasn't the big improvement over CVS that it was hailed as and are
hesitant to be through the process of switching VCS again. There's therefore
little incentive for me to rock the boat on my own.) Nonetheless, my
experience may be typical of others who are considering the same thing. From
http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/ForeignBranches/Subversion:

> Some Subversion properties can currently not be represented in Bazaar and
> are therefore ignored for the time being:
>
>    - 'svn:ignore' is not imported. There should be a
>    Repository.get_ignores(revid) call in Bazaar rather than a magic
>    '.bzrignore' file. Spec at
>    https://launchpad.net/products/bzr/+spec/new-ignore-rules
>    - 'svn:mime-type'
>    - 'svn:eol-style'. Requires eol support in Bazaar.
>    - 'svn:keywords'. Requires keywords support in Bazaar. Spec at
>    https://launchpad.net/products/bzr/+spec/bzr-keyword-expansion. #81463<https://bugs.launchpad.net/bzr-svn/+bug/81463>
>
> Other features currently held back by Bazaars feature set:
>
>    - 'svn:externals'. Externals should be mapped to Bazaar 'by-reference'
>    nested branches and the other way around. This can't be implemented until
>    Bazaars nested branch support lands. The current work-in-progress also needs
>    support for pointing at the tip of a branch rather than at a specific
>    revision.
>    - Tracking copies. . Spec at
>    https://launchpad.net/products/bzr/+spec/filecopies
>    - Showing SVN merges as merges in Bazaar. . Requires support for
>    cherry-picking. Spec at
>    https://launchpad.net/products/bzr/+spec/bzr-cpick-data
>
> First off is this list up to date? Every one of those links is over three
years old.

svn:ignore: The "Read full specification" link on the mentioned page is
broken. The blueprint is marked as implemented "long ago" but there is no
bug id or branch link.

svn:eol-style: If I edit or add files with bzr on OS X or Linux, will they
have the proper line endings when they are checked out in Windows with svn?

Again, I feel a little bad complaining here because I haven't really put the
effort into figuring it out myself. On a personal project I'd give it a
shot. But when I'm at work, where everybody else seems satisfied with
subversion, I read that page and my reaction is that it's not worth it. I'm
sure I'm not the only one who's had that reaction. Maybe the only problem is
documentation. Does a tutorial exist for using bzr in a subversion shop? If
so, there should be a link to it on that page; if not, I'd be willing to
help put one together.

-- 
Matthew Gordon
Application Developer

IVS3D
420 York Street
Third Floor
Fredericton, NB
E3E 2L4
Tel: (506)454-4487
Fax: (506)454-4487
Web: www.ivs3d.com
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