~bzr-pqm/bzr/bzr.dev : revision 4924.1.1

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Multi-site Setups

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The "distributed" in distributed version control system should indicate that

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Bazaar is well suited for multi-site development situations and indeed, that

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is the case. The advantage comes from the ease and transparency of managing

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merges between branches with divergent history. Note that there are many,

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many different ways to manage widely-flung development setups using Bazaar and

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its branching and merging capabilities. These can be discovered and tested

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before being implemented as policy. We will describe one such possible setup

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here.

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Consider ProjectX Corp's international expansion with a new branch office in

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Darwin, Australia, in addition to the company's headquarters in Austin, Texas,

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USA. One of the difficulties of a far-flung multi-site development

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environment such as this is that the network connection between Australia and

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Texas is slow and unreliable. So, each branch office would like the master

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branch to be local to them. (In situations with good network connectivity, a

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local branch bound to the remote master may be all that is needed to support

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multi-site development.)

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Of course, with two master branches, there is always the question of which one

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is authoritative. Given Bazaar's facility at managing multiple branches, we

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suggest that it is best not to privilege either the Texas or Australia

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branches, but to merge both of them into a separate master branch (which may

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reside at either site). For definiteness, we will locate the master branch at

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the Texas site. So, we will have three branches stored on two servers:

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trunk and texas-integration at the Texas site and australia-integration at the

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Darwin site. These branches are named in terms of the sites where the

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development takes place, but in many cases it may make more sense to name

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branches after the functional teams rather their geographical locations.

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Since we are trying illustrate the issues with multi-*site* development, we

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will persist in this naming scheme.

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Setup

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~~~~~

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Using our previous setup at the Texas site, we will simply rename the old

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trunk branch as trunk and branch a copy as texas-integration.

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::

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$ cd /srv/bzr/projectx

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$ mv trunk trunk # can simply rename on the filesystem

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$ bzr branch trunk texas-integration # very fast in a shared repository

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In Australia, we need to set up the ``/srv/bzr/projectx`` directory and get a

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copy of the current trunk as australia-integration::

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$ mkdir -p /srv/bzr

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$ cd /srv/bzr

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$ bzr init-repo --no-trees projectx

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$ cd projectx

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$ bzr branch bzr+ssh://server.example.com/srv/bzr/trunk

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$ bzr branch trunk australia-integration

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Merging to master

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Then, each office works with their local copy of the trunk. At some point,

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sooner or later depending on the pace of development in the two locations, the

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two local trunks need to be merged. (In general, sooner beats later when

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merging, since there is no penalty for multiple merges.) In this example,

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Alice at the Texas office will do the merging on her local machine using

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branches on the server::

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# Get a copy of the Australia branch in Texas. After the initial branch

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# command, use pull to keep the branch up to date. With a slow network,

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# this is the only slow part

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$ bzr branch bzr+ssh://autralia.example.com/srv/bzr/projectx/australia-integration \

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bzr+ssh://server.example.com/srv/bzr/projectx/australia-integration

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# Check out the master branch locally for doing the merge

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$ cd ~/projectx

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$ bzr checkout bzr+ssh://server.example.com/srv/bzr/projectx/trunk

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$ cd trunk

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$ bzr merge bzr+ssh://server.example.com/srv/bzr/projectx/texas-integration

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# Run the test suite and resolve any conflicts

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$ bzr commit -m "Merge Texas branch to master"

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# Now, merge from Australia using the local copy of that branch

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$ bzr merge bzr+ssh://server.example.com/srv/bzr/projectx/australia-integration

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# Run the test suite and resolve any conflicts between the two offices

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$ bzr commit -m "Merge Australia branch to master"

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Note that Bazaar does not commit even cleanly applied merges by default. This

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is because although a merge may apply cleanly, the merged state still needs to

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be checked before it is committed. (Just because there are no text conflicts

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does not mean that everything will work after a merge.) An alternative that

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can pull when possible and merge otherwise is available with

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``bzr merge --pull``.

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Merging back to local trunks

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Now the trunk branch is the most up-to-date version of the software and

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both of the local trunks need to reincorporate the changes from the master.

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If no new commits have been made to texas-integration, then that can happen using

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``bzr pull``::

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$ cd ~/projectx

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$ bzr checkout bzr+ssh://server.example.com/srv/bzr/projectx/texas-integration

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$ cd texas-integration

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$ bzr pull ../trunk # Use trunk from the local disk

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# No need to commit

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If new changes have happened on texas-integration since the integration with

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trunk, then the above pull will produce an error suggesting to use

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merge::

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$ bzr merge ../trunk

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# Run test suite, resolve conflicts

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$ bzr commit -m "Merging Australian changes"

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In Australia, they will need to update their local copy of trunk::

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$ cd /srv/bzr/projectx/trunk

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$ bzr pull # parent location is used by default

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Then, they need to pull or merge the changes from trunk into the local trunk.

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This should be done by a developer with a checkout of australia-integration so

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that they can run the test suite::

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$ cd ~/projectx

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$ bzr co bzr+ssh://australia.example.com/srv/bzr/projectx/australia-integration

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$ cd australia-integration

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$ bzr merge bzr+ssh://australia.example.com/srv/bzr/projectx/trunk

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# Run test suite and integrate Texan changes with only recent local

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# development

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$ bzr commit -m "Integrate work from Texas"

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Other Considerations

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Multi-site deployments can be complicated, due to the many possible variations

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of development velocity, divisions of labor, network connectivity, resources

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for integration, etc. The preceding description is meant to be one possible

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way to do fairly symmetric multi-site development. (Neither Texas or

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Australia is privileged in this structure.) In a situation where there is one

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main site and other smaller sites, one of the local trunk branches can be

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eliminated and trunk can be used directly for development at the main

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site.

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It is also up to the particular situation how frequently the local trunks are

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integrated into the master trunk. Given resources specifically for

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integration, it is conceivable that a developer may be constantly responsible

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for integrating changes from the two teams. Alternatively, the two sites

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could work on well-separated, well-defined features and merge to the master

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trunk only when their respective features are complete. Given the difficulty

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of resolving conflicts in very large merges and the ease of merge handling in

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Bazaar, we suggest that merges be done more frequently, rather than less.