Recipes vs. Looms vs. pipelines

[Barry Warsaw]

On Dec 16, 2009, at 4:58 PM, Aaron Bentley wrote:

> There are a lot of similarities.  Some more differences are:
> - - automatic storing/restoring of uncommitted changes with switch-pipe.
> - - uncommitted changes in another pipe can be merged.

These are very definitely advantages of pipes.

> I think that there are significant improvements to the command set:
> 
> In loom, up-thread and down-thread are asymmetric.  The analogue of
> down-thread is switch-pipe, and the analogue of up-thread --auto is pump.
> 
> The command for removing a pipe is called "remove-pipe", whereas the
> command for removing a thread is called "combine-thread".
> 
> pipeline has lp-submit to submit a merge proposal for a pipe to
> Launchpad.  It is impossible to submit a merge proposal for a thread to
> launchpad, because threads aren't addressable.
> 
> pipeline provides pipe-patches, to export the pipeline as a series of
> patches.

Ultimately what both pipes and looms gives me is a way to organize the subtasks I have to perform when developing a piece of software.  They let me answer questions and produce output based on those subtasks instead of the more-granular revisions.  Both looms and pipelines feel like bolt-ons to support this kind task-based workflow, so pulling those features and supporting those use-cases in core bzr would be a good long-term goal.

-Barry