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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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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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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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$ 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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$ bzr init-repo --no-trees 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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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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$ bzr checkout bzr+ssh://server.example.com/srv/bzr/projectx/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 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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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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# 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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$ 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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$ bzr commit -m "Integrate work from Texas"
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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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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.
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doc/en/admin-guide/advanced.txt
