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***************
Shared branches
***************
How much can we simulate the single-branch model of svn/cvs? GNU arch
does reasonably well, but at the cost of making disconnected/connected
operation leave ugly merge marks in the project history.
This does seem to be a drawback of the otherwise-good branch/tree
fusion.
`Greg Hudson`__ makes the very good point that the Linux kernel is
quite unusual among free software projects in relying on human
integrators, rather than having a shared branch between the
committers. The other case is very small projects (distcc?) where
there is a single person with commit access.
__ http://web.mit.edu/ghudson/thoughts/bitkeeper.whynot
I think decentralized systems can still be very good, but they need to
support this model very well: a team of committers, working on a
single trunk branch, but merging from other branches as well. The
Samba team is more typical of a demanding open-source project than the
kernel is.
People fundamentally want to be able to share a tree and all commit
into it. It's fine to support other models (like sending patches to
an owner/integrator/maintainer), but it is not reasonable to require
that there be exactly one such person.
arch-pqm is a clever kludge; shouldn't be required. Setting up email
on all clients, and scripts to automatically process email on the
server is certainly possible. But for some people it may not be easy;
it is never trivial to debug; and particularly for Windows users it
may be very hard. If you don't control your own email server or
cannot easily run scripts it will be even more messy.
The model of Bitkeeper, and the default model of Bazaar-NG, is that
each branch has one owner and exists in one place. People submit
their patches to the owner of the branch. This is a pretty good
model, but has some limitations.
It is a tough transition from CVS; it requires that people learn a
whole new way of working as well as a new tool.
If the person who owns the branch is away, should all integration
work stop?
I'm not totally confident in Darcs; it seems like the shared branch
can reach a state that is not exactly the same as any of the
checkouts. Maybe not? In other respects it is a good model.
Possible solution: bound branches
---------------------------------
You can make a branch which is a write-through mirror of another
branch. They work like CVS checkouts in that you must be connected
and fully up-to-date to commit. These can hold as much history as you
like from the main branch, so you can view history, annotate, make new
branches when offline. If you are offline for a long time then make a
new branch, then integrate it back later.
The effect is similar to systems which have separate working copies
and storage: we have one branch used primarily as a workarea, and
another used as storage. I think that making them both branches
is possibly cleaner: it expresses the way some state may be held
locally, allows offline branching from the bound branch, etc.
::
$ bzr get http://foo.net/foo ./foo-main
$ cd foo-main
(make some changes)
$ bzr commit -m 'Add my neat feature'
bzr: error: this branch is not-up-to-date with master
http://foo.net/foo
- run 'bzr update'
- or detach this branch from its parent to work independently
$ bzr update
- setting aside local changes
- pulling changes from parent
- putting back local changes
$ bzr commit -m 'Add my neat feature'
The ``get`` command is very similar to ``branch``, but means that
commits will be written back.
This means that the ``pull`` or ``update`` command must be able to
work even when there are local changes, by setting them aside. This
in turn means that local changes may conflict with remote changes, and
that has to be resolved -- that is no worse than in pulling in changes
from elsewhere.
commit to a master repository should fail if the slave's patch history
is not exactly equal to that of the master -- the slave has diverged.
If the slave history is a prefix of the master history then an update
will do it. Otherwise, they have diverged and the slave gets
detached.
We can have shared server-side hooks, even for access control, at
least in principle.
Perhaps ``bind`` is a nicer word than ``slave``.
It is conceptually possible to take an existing branch and bind it to
another, as long as the history of the first is a prefix of that of
the second. One could also unbind a branch. These should at most be
advanced commands, because in general it is simpler just to make a new
branch with the desired properties.
Difficulties
~~~~~~~~~~~~
It may be a bit hard to get a remote commit exactly right,
particularly if we want to keep a working copy there. If working
copies are optional, then turning it off will keep things simple but
not totally avoid the problem.
I think this is just an example of a general problem though: there is
no totally satisfactory way to atomically update a working copy.
(What happens to cvs or svn if you interrupt while it's doing this?
Generally you get a broken wc.) What we can do is create a lock while
the update is taking place, which can be used to at least detect the
problem.
If changes are allowed to the working copy of the master branch then
they might conflict with what is committed by the slave. Should those
changes be merged into the working copy of the parent? If so, they
might conflict.
(darcs handles this case by inserting conflict markers in the remote
file, which seems unsatisfactory to me.)
So I am inclined to say that at the moment of pushing to a master
branch, the destination should be clean. If we have explicit edits
then probably there should be no editable files there. (We could
perhaps make all the files read-only for the duration of the update.)
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