simple use case advice

[Neil Martinsen-Burrell]

On 2010-10-04 18:45 , Martin Pool wrote:
> On 4 October 2010 12:01, Stephen J. Turnbull<stephen at xemacs.org>  wrote:
>> Martin Pool writes:
>>
>>   >  stay there.  But it's easy to hurt yourself this way, by accidentally
>>   >  copying over the top of something you didn't mean to replace.  I would
>>   >  really recommend switching a working tree by either having it bound to
>>   >  a separate bzr branch (bzr checkout br1 work; cd work; bzr switch
>>   >  ../br2), or by using bzr-colo.
>>
>> He doesn't already have the branch, so you need to include the
>> branching steps, too.
>>
>> AFAIK using switch effectively requires a well-designed workflow, and
>> bzr-colo is still pretty alpha, or at best early beta, no?
>>
>> So it's a tradeoff.  I've *never* shot myself in the foot doing things
>> the way I suggested; I don't think it's that "easy" to make that kind
>> of mistake.  Nevertheless I don't recommend it, just mentioned that
>> it's an option if preserving build products is important.  And of
>> course I would *never* use it if I didn't absolutely need cruft from
>> the origin branch.
>
> In my experience bzr colo looks very reliable and polished.  I would
> call it at least a solid beta.  As you like git-style workflows I
> would really like to hear what you think of it.

I think that bzr colo is nearly as reliable as Bazaar itself, since it 
adds no new internal features.  The entire content of the plugin is 
essentially syntactic sugar for referring easily to branches located at 
./.bzr/branches and combining commonly used commands.  If you are 
unwilling to try something even that beta, it would be possible to 
create a document that translates bzr-colo commands into a (possibly 
much longer) sequence of Bazaar commands.  If there is interest in such 
a thing, I can work on it in the medium-term future.

-Neil