Subject: Re: VCS comparison table

From: "Matthew D. Fuller" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2006 09:56:58 -0500

On Sun, Oct 22, 2006 at 10:24:54AM -0400 I heard the voice of
Sean, and lo! it spake thus:
> 
> Light goes on.  Okay.  So a bzr "branch" is only ever editable on a
> single machine.  So there is no distributed development on top of a
> bzr "branch".  Everyone else just has read-only copies of it.

Ah!  Yes, that's exactly[0] right.  Mark up another of those "so
obvious we never think to state it" thought-patterns   :|

Distributed development proper only happens on 'projects', not
branches.  In practice, we say "we're all working on branch X", in the
sense that we use it as a base to work from and intend to merge our
stuff into it, but strictly speaking we're all working on our own
branches that just merge from/into X from time to time.

That's also why we use the phrases "merge from" and "merge to", rather
than "merge WITH".  Of course, where possible, we could 'fast-forward'
to X rather than merge from it, at which point we'd then momentarily
have exactly X, but culturally we don't seem to like doing that.

[0] There are a few very special-case exceptions, notably around the
'checkout' concept or where people are very carefully manually
maintaining sync, but they're irrelevant in this case; and they ARE
star-pattern developments that could be said to be 'centralized'.  Now
I grok where that's coming from.

-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  [email-masked]
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.