Announcing bzr-tiplog

[Brian de Alwis]

I'm pleased to announce bzr-tiplog, a bzr plugin for recording and using the history of changes to a branch's tip.  tiplog is the equivalent to git's reflog.

Tiplog records the history of the tip of a branch.  The plugin adds new command called 'tiplog' (aliased to 'reflog' too) to show the tip history for a particular branch.  The plugin adds a new revspec 'tip:i' to reference the i'th tip revision; tip:0 is the current tip.

With tiplog, you no longer have to remember to record the previous tip.  It's particularly useful for backing out a change that you've pulled into a branch such as a plugin update that's causing massive breakage.

To install:

  $ bzr branch lp:bzr-tiplog ~/.bazaar/plugins/tiplog

Examples of use:

$ bzr tiplog
2011-09-23 tip:0 185 server [push] Update to latest changes
2011-09-23 tip:1 184 server [push] Periodic commit of configuration
2011-09-23 tip:2 ??? server [push] Checkpoint before refactor

$ bzr log -c tip:1
------------------------------------------------------------
revno: 184
committer: Brian de Alwis <bsd at acm.org>
timestamp: Wed 2010-10-20 10:49:21 -0400
message:
  Periodic commit of configuration

$ bzr pull -r tip:1 --overwrite .
Now on revision 184.

$ bzr tiplog
2011-09-23 tip:0 184 server [push] Periodic commit of configuration
2011-09-23 tip:1 ??? server [push] Update to latest changes
2011-09-23 tip:2 184 server [push] Periodic commit of configuration
2011-09-23 tip:3 ??? server [push] Checkpoint before refactor

$ bzr tiplog ../other
2011-09-23 tip:0 175 bsd at acm.org [pull] Change
2011-09-23 tip:1 175 bsd at acm.org [commit] Change
2011-09-23 tip:2 174 bsd at acm.org [pull] Periodic commit of Butler config items
2011-09-23 tip:3 ??? bsd at acm.org [pull] Periodic commit of Keychain items
$ bzr tiplog --show-ids ../other
2011-09-23 tip:0 bsd at acm.org-20110923125233-arm77ohh501lvhsi bsd at acm.org [pull] Change
2011-09-23 tip:1 bsd at acm.org-20110923125233-arm77ohh501lvhsi bsd at acm.org [commit] Change
2011-09-23 tip:2 bsd at acm.org-20100804145052-bm2s8g7rrb0mw08j bsd at acm.org [pull] Periodic commit of Butler con...
2011-09-23 tip:3 bsd at acm.org-20100804145105-bm9o2gp9wt9pxxf8 bsd at acm.org [pull] Periodic commit of Keychai...