treeless branches + lightweight co-s or colocated branches

[Neil Martinsen-Burrell]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 2:47 AM, Gour <gour at atmarama.net> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm new (old) Bazaar user who (finally) decided, after playing or using
> most of DVCS - darcs, bzr, monotone, hg, fossil (git excluded), to
> settle on bzr finding it the most intuitive & safe option for ourselves
> and potential contributors for our open-source project coming from
> Windows/Mac platform.
>
> Yesterday we experimented with a shared repo + treeless branches and then
> using lightweight checkouts and switch-ing between different branches.
>
> It's very nice setup and now we use e.g. treeless repo + lightweight
> checkouts for a running programs to keep their config data under dvcs,
> but having repo in the other place.
>
> Now, I wonder how does this setup (treeless branches + switching
> lightweight checkouts compare with colocated branches?
>
> Any pro/cons?

If having the repository in a different location is important, then
lightweight checkouts of a treeless repository is ideal. (This
flexibility in setup is one of Bazaar's strengths...and weaknesses).
If you don't mind the repository being in the .bzr subdirectory of
wherever your configuration lives, then colocated branches could work
well.

> First thing I notice that the latter requires using new storage format
> and second, I see that 2.6 docs
> (http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/developers/colocated-branches.html) use
> future tense in several places, so we wonder how much is the 'colocated
> branches' feature complete in the current bzr and what to expect in 2.6?
>
> Is bzr-colo plugin obsolete now?

bzr-colo is alive and well and I will continue to maintain it to
provide colocated branch functionality for versions of Bazaar before
2.6.  I had hoped to be able to easily map the bzr-colo UI on top of
Bazaar's new colocated branch functionality, but that has been more
work (and I have had less time) than I expected. Instead, I think that
the best way forward is when the UI for colocated branches matures in
bzr 2.7, that I will recommend people to use that instead, although
bzr-colo's version of colocated branches will continue to work as
well.

-Neil