Bazaar Mercurial Plugin to access BitBucket

[Martin Geisler]

Barry Warsaw <barry at canonical.com> writes:

> On Oct 23, 2011, at 02:03 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>
> The other thing I like about one-branch-per-directory is that they're
> very cheap. I might have three different stabs at a fix going on, none
> of which I'm completely happy with yet. But who cares? because it's
> easy to just create a new local branch to experiment with. Later, I'll
> either just delete the directory, or commit and merge to the trunk.

That's actually the real reason many people prefer co-located branches:
they work on something like OpenOffice where a working copy is 2 GB and
so it's not fun at all to make a new local clone. Switching between two
branches can be cheap even with a huge repository since you only need to
touch the files that are really different between the two revisions.

> The other troublesome bit is that when I grab a clone, I get
> *everything* even for branches I might not care about.

Yeah, that's still problematic.

>> [1] Ie, what I said about "mostly useless" is from the point of view
>> of a project full of developers who dislike coloc. Personally, in the
>> workflows I find natural, a coloc structure makes a huge amount of
>> sense. However, AFAIK it should be easy to pull down a bunch of
>> branches from python.org and make a coloc repo of them for oneself,
>> and that should only need to be done once.
>
> I think that's the key for me. colo-branches is the way Mercurial
> tends to be most comfortable in. Bazaar prefers
> one-branch-per-directory. With all the caveats that come with those
> last two statements, Bazaar's model feels much more natural to me.

I would actually say that Mercurial still has a modest to strong bias
towards branching-by-directory. Mostly because it's ackward to push and
pull if you have several feature branches and you don't want to move
them all.

Mercurial will also remind you to merge whenever you have more than one
head -- and you'll have more than one head if you use bookmarks to track
your feature branches. Pushing those require -f and that scares people.

For me, the nice part of Mercurial is that you can do in-repo-branching
or branching-by-directory as you like -- and it's all part of the same
simple and uniform model.

So you can have a two-branch-per-repo strategy if you like :-)

-- 
Martin Geisler

Mercurial links: http://mercurial.ch/
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