Re: Locks on the Bzr repository

[Leo <sdl.web@gmail.com>]

On 2010-08-21 19:59 +0100, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> D'oh. You just don't ever want to do development in your mirror branch
> (unless it's bound). The reason this is a problem in bzr (and to some
> extent hg) is that branches are heavyweight; you don't want scads of
> them being made automatically for internal operations. So the user has
> to make mirror branches explicitly when needed. git makes branching
> extremely lightweight, and therefore need not hesitate to use mirror
> ("tracking") branches which are read-only to the user, and hardly
> visible.

Branching in git is as fast as:

  echo 7adb0b64823cbdcfbbcac9a9e32c6b435f57d889 > .git/refs/heads/mybranch

basically writing a 40-char string to a file. Because it is so cheap it
completely change many people's workflow. Even for my occasional hacking
of emacs, I have:

* Ferrari
  emacs-server
  emacs-trunk
  git-send-email
  ido
  ido-old
  leo
  mac-port
  master
  processes

It is extremely difficult to lose data in git. So rebase is as safe as
commit. Knowing that I can easily reorganise my private history (it
takes ~ 5 seconds) I also use commit as a way of backup. Using git
really gives you the feeling of using the right tool that is as
intelligent as human being as far as content tracking is concerned.

Leo