This is the sixth in a series of posts about current topics in the development world of the Bazaar distributed version control system. The series is co-authored by John Arbash Meinel, one of the primary developers on Bazaar, and Elliot Murphy, who just wants a nice story and a nap.
1.6 on the way
We decided to change the release process a bit for the bzr 1.6 release. We're introducing a bit more than normal in this relase (such as Stacked Branches), so we've decided to delay the final release a couple of weeks to ensure that everything gets an extra coat of polish. We've already had 2 beta releases, which are available in the Source.
Please give it a poke and let us know what you think.
Diff and Merge Tools
When you start working with other people on a project, you need some way of seeing what code has changed, doing code reviews, resolving conflicts, etc. The 'bzr diff' command has a '--using=foo' argument that allows you to plug in your favorite diff/merge tool if you don't want the built-in text based diff. You can also add an alias for your favorite tool. For example, Elliot uses meld all the time, so he has 'alias mdiff=diff --using=meld'. You also might want to install the difftools plugin, which adds some smarts to Bazaar about whether a particular tool understands how to diff a full tree or needs to handle the files one at a time. Here are some of the more interesting diff tools that you might want to try out:
One technique for easily reviewing a lot of incoming code is to keep around a pristine branch of your project that you use for conducting reviews. You can apply a patch to the tree, then run 'bzr mdiff' (or your own favorite tool), and take a look at all the changes in the patch with a lot more context than is included in the patch itself. This also gives you a spot to run the automated tests for that project, see if it compiles, etc. Once you are done with the review you can simply 'bzr revert' to get back to a clean tree and move on to the next patch to be reviewed.
Another neat trick is to use the 'merge --preview' switch. You might want to use this command to take a look at any conflicts that might have been introduced if there have been changes since the patch was generated. It shows you the patch of exactly what would be merged into the branch at that moment in time, which can sometimes have differences from what you would be reviewing by reading the patch.
Another interesting (but commercial) tool is Changes.app. It is a Mac OS X client which integrates with Finder and provides a comparison tool. It has direct support for Bazaar as well as several other version control systems.
Screencasts
Screencasts are becoming a very popular way to show people how to use your fancy tool, and we'd like to get some volunteers to help with putting together some screencasts explaining how to use various parts of bzr and related tools. If you want to help with this, email elliot at canonical dot com. The great thing about screencasts is that they use a different avenue for conveying information (audio, motion, etc) so while it won't replace a written tutorial, it is a wonderful supplement.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I really like the idea of "This Week in Bazaar", it shows that the project is alive and more important that the Bazaar team cares about their users.
I think it is important to see that there is something going an in a project.
One small suggestion, I especially like some neat tricks like the one to define an alias to run a different merge tool.
Thanks for doing this series and good luck.
Kind regards
Pascal
Post a Comment