This guide is meant as an introduction to shared repositories in Bazaar. I am by no means an expert at Bazaar, hence there is no guarentee that all terms provided are correct.
Shared Repositories
Whenever we want to share our repositories across different users, it may be wise to use shared repositores.
To create a shared repository:
$ bzr init-repo foo-repo
init-repo : Creates a shared repository (this is the same command as init-repository
foo-repo : this is the name of the repository
Bazaar Explorer
Under Bazaar Explorer, I like to use the “All” button:
Adding Branches
To add branches (e.g. stable, development branches) we use:
$ bzr init bar-repo
init : Makes a directory into a version branch
bar-repo : this is the name of the branch
Bazaar Explorer
Under Bazaar Explorer, I like to use the “All” button, making sure you navigate to the repository as created above:
Now you can simply drag and drop files in the same manner that you normally would.
So then, what’s the difference? Why would we bother?
Version control allows us to keep track of all changes. Whenever you wish to preserve a state you must Commit the changes.
Committed changes will also have the author’s name and comments attached to it, to ensure that we understand why a commit was needed for a production piece of code and to provide an audit log if necessary.
This is where I found Bazaar Explorer to be friendly than other GUI and open source versions of version control such as:
Although this may be seen as ‘amateur’ by most programmers, the truth is for data analysts whose programming consists of recording macros, and writing SAS code, and pre-generated SQL, this is a god-send. In my opinion, Bazaar Explorer does an amazing job.
The difference between different version control suites are negligible, since data analysts would place more focus on ease of use rather than features. To data analysts the differences would be more cosmetic than anything else, since scripts are not complex, nor would our knowledge be well developed.
Add
You must first add files to be monitored by Bazaar. Simply follow on-screen instructions and this will be completed for you.
Bazaar Explorer
Click on the + sign under “What’s Next”:
Commit
The advantage of Bazaar compared with SVN, Git, CVS is the ease-of-use with its GUI under Windows.
To commit changes to a branch, navigate to the repository, then the branch, and then commit the changes. (You can view changes between the current version and the previous version using Diff).
Bazaar Explorer
Click on the ‘arrow’ sign under “What’s Next” and type in your message:
Pull/Push
Pull new revisions from another branch making this branch a mirror of it. I like to think of it as getting the latest update from production branch.
Push new revisions to another branch making it a mirror of this one. I like to think of it as updating the production branch after we’re satisfied with our development
Bazaar Explorer
- Click on the ‘Pull/Push’ icon in the toolbox under the toolbar
- Navigate to the branch you push to Pull/Push from
Merge
Merge changes from another branch into this one. Sometimes we might only be changing a single script, not everything in production. We would open our production repository and Merge changes to our production branch if thats what we desire.
Bazaar Explorer
- Click on the ‘Merge’ icon in the toolbox under the toolbar
- Navigate to the branch you push to Merge from
The nice thing about merges and logs is the nice summary you would have
