Merging New trunk Features to a Development Branch (redux)

Oubiwann has recently posted about the joys of using Combinator to do branch-based development using Subversion. I thought it’d be fun to do the same post, except this time with Bazaar.

Background #

You’re working on a project called “Project”, you have a copy of the mainline branch (i.e. ’trunk’) in your src directory.

~$ cd ~/src/Project~/src/Project$ lstrunk

You want to implement a new feature, so you branch trunk to work on it:

~/src/Project$ bzr branch trunk viking-feature-836

Bazaar is a version control system, not a PYTHONPATH-managing system, so it doesn’t maintain a global list of projects and the branches that are currently active for each project.

Perhaps your company focuses on historical invasions of Britain. You decide to start work on another feature:
lass objects.

~/src/Project$ bzr branch trunk norman-feature-1066

You multi-task for a bit, until you finish ‘viking-feature’. You decide to merge ‘viking-feature-836’ into trunk.

~/src/Project$ cd trunk~/src/Project/trunk$ bzr merge ../viking-feature-836~/src/Project/trunk$ bzr ci

At this point, you begin to suspect that Bazaar treats branches as first-class objects. However, at this point, a developer on the obverse side of your continent calls you,

“Where’s your viking feature? I need it to invade Britain!”

“I’ve just put it into trunk. Have you got the latest copy?”

“Yeah, I do, I just pulled from trunk.”

“It’s in trunk, you fool! … Oh, wait, gimme a sec.”

~/src/Project/trunk$ bzr pushPushing to bzr+ssh://bzr.example.com/Project/trunk...~/src/Project/trunk$

“Try now.”

Merging #

OK, enough background, let’s merge.

Say you need some of the changes in trunk in order to finish work on your norman feature. No problems.

~/src/Project$ bzr merge trunk norman-feature-1066~/src/Project$ bzr ci -m "Merge from trunk."

It’s hard not to feel smug at this point.

Wait a second, you also want to look at the experimental branch that a friend is working on:

~/src/Project/norman-feature-1066$ bzr merge bzr+ssh://yourfriend.example.com/branches/sealion-1946~/src/Project/norman-feature-1066$ bzr diff | less # better double check this one~/src/Project/norman-feature-1066$ bzr revert # nope, doesn't seem like a good idea

Summary #

Bazaar treats branches as first-class objects and treats trunk just like any other branch. Although Combinator is great for branch-based development in Subversion, it is more complex and less flexible than doing branch-based development in Bazaar.

With Combinator, you lose history when you merge in changes from trunk, with Bazaar you don’t.

With Combinator, you can only merge in changes from trunk, with Bazaar you can merge from any branch.

With Combinator, merging from trunk leaves a bunch of changed files in the trunk checkout on your system (this has tripped me up more than once). With Bazaar, this doesn’t happen.