Subject: Re: VCS comparison table

From: Matthieu Moy <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 15:27:36 +0200

Andreas Ericsson <[email-masked]> writes:

> What about
>
> 3) getting the repo with all the history while still not having to be
> online to actually commit to *your* copy of the repo. When you later
> get online, you can send all your changes in a big hunk, or let bazaar
> email them to the maintainer as patches, or...

Well, the discussion was about checkouts, so I was talking about
checkouts ;-).

What you mention is the default behavior of Bazaar when you use 
"bzr branch" or "bzr get". BTW, it's also possible to do this with a
heavy checkout, that's "commit --local".

> It appears we have different ideas of what's handy. Perhaps it's just
> a difference in workflow, or lack of "email-commits-as-patches" tools
> in bazaar,

You have "bzr bundle" in Bazaar, and there was work to have it
actually send the email ( http://bazaar-vcs.org/SubmitByMail ), but I
don't think it's finished yet.

And yes, this is a great feature, the first time I used it was with
Darcs, and I was impressed how easy I could submit a patch without any
setup and with a 5-lines tutorial. Even wiki seems complex after
that ;-).

> but the ability to commit to whatever branch I like in my local repo
> and then just send the diffs by email or please-pull requests to
> upstream authors is what makes git work so well for me.

Sure. Once again, Bazaar does it this way too. There's an _additional
feature_ called checkout which allows you to work in another way,
though. As most "feature", it's not useful to everybody.

And I repeat that I'm in no way arguing against the git model :-).

> Side-note 2: Three really great things that have made work a lot
> easier and more enjoyable since we changed from cvs to git and that
> aren't mentioned in the comparison table:

Sure. And regarding this, hopufully, most modern VCS go in the same
direction.

> * Dependency/history graph display tools á la qgit/gitk

http://bazaar-vcs.org/bzr-gtk
http://samba.org/~jelmer/bzr/bzrk.png

> * Bisection tool for finding bug introduction revisions.

This took time to come in bzr, but that's the bisect plugin:

http://bazaar-vcs.org/PluginRegistry

> * Tools for sending commits as emails.

(Surprisingly, I had added this in the table, but has been removed for
some obscure reasons)

-- 
Matthieu