Comments on: Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

By: Dmitri

Dmitri — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 14:53:30 +0000

Blake: QBzr/bzr-gtk have this weird concept of just adding commands to start GUIs. I just know that for the first 2 months of using it, I’ll forget to prepend those q’s and g’s to the commands I use, and for the rest of the time, I’ll be typing svn gdiff and cursing when it doesn’t work. TortoiseBzr is windows-only. I already use –show-diff and it works for me, but Subclipse for example lets me choose which files to add/commit and I can double-click on any to view a diff.

Thanks for the bzrweb pointer. Didn’t know about this one.

By: Blake Winton

Blake Winton — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:56:45 +0000

DW: What don’t you like about bzr-svn? I’ve seen a lot of messages on the Bazaar mailing list from the author, and he seems more than happy to accept patches. Uh, I mean, more than happy to get feature requests, so that he knows what to work on next.

Dmitri: For visual tools, did you check out QBzr (http://bazaar-vcs.org/QBzr) or bzr-gtk (http://bazaar-vcs.org/bzr-gtk) or TortoiseBzr (http://bazaar-vcs.org/TortoiseBzr)?

For the checkin message from diffs, “bzr commit –show-diff” seems like it should do what you want.

For the web-interface, check out http://bzr.latte.ca/ (it’s running bzrweb, which you can find at https://launchpad.net/bzrweb/).

By: Dmitri

Dmitri — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 18:56:08 +0000

I’ve been using bazaar for a 494 project this term. It’s a pleasure to use and very intuitive. But it’s definitely not ready for student use. There’s practically no IDE support (there’s bzr-eclipse, but it’s alpha and I’m afraid to use it), no visual tools to browse a repository/branch (like rapidsvn) or compile a checkin message from diffs (Subclipse rocks at this), and no web interface.

I find the documentation much better than for SVN, though. Reading the user guide for bzr taught me more than the entire SVN book.

By: David Wolever

David Wolever — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 02:57:36 +0000

“I don’t think SVK will win the ticket”

Nope — it sure won’t. Overall, it’s very mediocre. But when it comes to working with Subversion repositories, it’s the simplest one I’ve yet to see (although I’ve got my fingers crossed that bzr-svn will eventually be decent).

Yea, Blake, that’s exactly it — you and I can use bzr, svk, whatever, while everyone else uses Subversion.

By: Blake Winton

Blake Winton — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:31:51 +0000

This is slightly off-topic, but “using version control for backup” is one of the reasons I’ve switched to Bazaar from Subversion. With Subversion creating a new repository for a directory seemed really complicated. With Bazaar, it’s just “bzr init;bzr add .;bzr commit -m ‘initial version’”.

More on-topic, I think that this is one of the reasons backwards/cross-tool compatibility is so important. You don’t need to be running Bazaar or Svk for David and I to use them. They both (if I remember correctly) talk to Subversion repositories. So people who don’t learn the new tools can still get stuff done, but those of us who have more time to futz with partially-implemented things can still use the new tools and develop the tutorials/Eclipse plugins/etc.

By: Dirkjan

Dirkjan — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:17:14 +0000

If and when the time comes to move to distributed version control, I don’t think SVK will win the ticket. You might want to look at Mercurial, which recently went 1.0 and has a hgbook. Additionally, it comes with a web interface built-in, is very light, and only requires Python to get going.

I really recommend it; the time has come.