centralized bzr (Re: Successful and unsuccessful Debian development tools)
* Christoph Haas [Tue, 01 Aug 2006 17:33:15 +0200]:
Hi,
> No offense intended - honestly - but the problem of passing
> patches/patchsets around between the maintainers is really a problem. In
> Subversion I know where the authoritative instance lies that is the master
> instance keeping the current state. If there is one superior maintainer
> who makes the repository available online to co-maintainers who are just
> allowed to send in patches - that might work well. But if several people
> are equally involved in a project this seems to quickly become a problem.
> I had tried distributed RCSs just because it's a more "modern" approach and
> because a number of developers and maintainers seem to find Subversion
> problematic. But if I group maintain a package and need to collect
> everybody's work before building and uploading a package that's just too
> hard.
> The bazaar-ng web site describes a few ways to pass the changes around
> (http://bazaar-vcs.org/BzrForCVSUsers) but I found neither one very
> appealing. I don't mind other team members working locally. But I need to
> get access to their changes ASAP to have them included in the next
> release/revision.
Right, bzr is great when you have a designed person to integrate
contributor's changes after review.
But if you have a set of equal developers, bzr can be also used in a
very similar way to Subversion, where all commits go to a central
repository, and nobody has to collect them. It's just a matter of
setting up a directory somewhere with the appropriate write permissions,
and say "This is our canonical archive, the uploader will include what
it's in there, nothing more, nothing less".
Then each developer can prepare a set of changes offline, do all the
branching, merging, commiting and uncommiting (gotta love that) that
they want, and when they're done, do e.g.:
% bzr push sftp://costa.debian.org/bzr/pkg-xiph/vorbis-tools
(That repository actually exists.)
The only piece missing in this scheme is e-mail notification. I very
much like how with Subversion it's trivial to set up a pkg-foo-commits
list. Haven't figured out a "nice" way with bzr yet, suggestions
welcome.
HTH,
--
Adeodato Simó dato at net.com.org.es
Debian Developer adeodato at debian.org
A. Because it breaks the logical sequence of discussion
Q. Why is top posting bad?
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