Conflicts due to independently creating identical files

[vila]

>>>>> Marco Pantaleoni <marco.pantaleoni at gmail.com> writes:

    > On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 12:51 PM, vila
    > <v.ladeuil+lp at free.fr<v.ladeuil%2Blp at free.fr>
    >> wrote:

    >> >>>>> Andrew S Townley <ast at atownley.org> writes:
    >> 
    >> If you maintain the trees yourself, you may want to resync their
    >> histories too, that would get rid of the conflicts entirely. Also using
    >> Unison (based on rsync right ?) should not give better results than 'bzr
    >> pull' (especially if you use the recommended stable 2a format).
    >> 

    > I wonder if unison could be used to keep synchronized a selection of machine
    > specific branches contained in shared repositories. Suppose a shared
    > repository 'repo' is laid out as in:

    > repo/
    > repo/trunk
    > repo/dev
    > repo/machine_a/trunk
    > repo/machine_a/dev
    > repo/machine_b/trunk
    > repo/machine_b/dev

    > could I just keep synchronized (across machine A and machine B) with unison
    > the repo/machine_a/* and repo/machine_b/* branches? Would it work?
    > (the idea is that on machine A one works only with repo/machine_a/* and on
    > machine B only with repo/machine_b/*)

That may work, but it's a bad idea to generalize the approach, bzr
ensures writes are atomic for the repository, but it does so using files
or directories to establish the locks, if you happen to sync with Unison
at the wrong time you could end up with broken repos.

And again, bzr should do a better job than Unison (especially when
repacks have occurred).

        Vincent