Local branches with a bazaar?

Question

I recently talked to Git to get an idea of ​​distributed version control. Now I look at Bazaar, but I can’t figure out how to create a local branch, i.e. A branch that I don’t need to click on when I want to make changes. With Git, I would do

git branch branch_name

or

git checkout -b branch_name

Then I can work in my local branch, making changes when I go, without having to make changes to the remote repo. When I’ve finished working with a branch, I can combine it with my local master branch. If I want, I can then make these changes to the remote repo.

Is this possible with Bazaar? Bazaar seems to be more like SVN, and branches are just separate directories, so maybe not.

Answer 1

Yes, you can definitely do it.

Say there is a remote repository in bzr + ssh: //foo.com/repo/mainline

You can create a local branch by doing:

 bzr branch bzr+ssh://foo.com/repo/mainline local_branch 

Now you can make changes to local_branch and commit them, and these changes are only in this local directory. eg:.

 cd local_branch touch foo bzr add foo bzr commit -m "Add foo." 

This will add foo only to the local branch.

Answer 2

If you configured your repository correctly, you can work similarly to git.

 cd ~/dev bzr init-repo bzr reconfigure --with-no-trees mkdir branches bzr branch bzr+ssh://foo.com/repo branches/mainline bzr checkout --lightweight branches/mainline working 

This will create a structure like this:

 /dev /branches /mainline <other branches go here> /working <this is your working tree> 

And if you want to create branches, you can do the following:

 cd ~/dev/checkout bzr branch --switch ~/dev/branches/mainline ~/dev/branches/some-feature 

and now you will be taken to some-feature branch, which will be at the same point as mainline.

Answer 3

bzr differs from git in that you cannot switch the branch represented by the working directory. You can branch from your working directory, but instead of having a branch from a remote repository. Therefore, instead of

 git clone git+ssh://foo.com/repo cd repo git checkout -b new_branch 

would you do

 bzr branch bzr+ssh://foo.com/repo bzr branch repo new_branch 

Answer 4

An old question, but it seems that colocated branches are the way to this for now. Bzr includes a plugin with various convenience features, including colo-init for creating repositories with linking enabled and colo-branch for actual use / creating branches (I haven't used these features yet, so maybe this was a bit mixed up.)