Common workspace layouts

The best way for a Bazaar user to organize their workspace for a project depends on numerous factors including:

• user role: project owner vs core developer vs casual contributor
• workflows: particularly the workflow the project encourages/mandates for making contributions
• size: large projects have different resource requirements to small ones.

There are at least 4 common ways of organizing one’s workspace:

• lightweight checkout
• standalone tree
• feature branches
• switchable sandbox.

A brief description of each layout follows.

Lightweight checkout

In this layout, the working tree is local and the branch is remote. This is the standard layout used by CVS and Subversion: it’s simple and well understood.

To set up:

bzr checkout --lightweight URL project
cd project

To work:

(make changes)
bzr commit
(make changes)
bzr commit

Note that each commit implicitly publishes the change to everyone else working from that branch. However, you need to be up to date with changes in the remote branch for the commit to succeed. To grab the latest code and merge it with your changes, if any:

bzr update

Standalone tree

In this layout, the working tree & branch are in the one place. Unless a shared repository exists in a higher level directory, the repository is located in that same place as well. This is the default layout in Bazaar and it’s great for small to moderately sized projects.

To set up:

bzr branch URL project
cd project

To work:

(make changes)
bzr commit
(make changes)
bzr commit

To publish changes to a central location:

bzr push [URL]

The URL for push is only required the first time.

If the central location has, in the meantime, received changes from other users, then you’ll need to merge those changes into your local branch before you try to push again:

bzr merge
(resolve conflicts)
bzr commit

As an alternative, a checkout can be used. Like a branch, a checkout has a full copy of the history stored locally but the local branch is bound to the remote location so that commits are published to both locations at once.

Note: A checkout is actually smarter than a local commit followed by a push. In particular, a checkout wil commit to the remote location first and only commit locally if the remote commit succeeds.

Feature branches

In this layout, there are multiple branches/trees, typically sharing a repository. One branch is kept as a mirror of “trunk” and each unit-of-work (i.e. bug-fix or enhancement) gets its own “feature branch”. This layout is ideal for most projects, particularly moderately sized ones.

To set up:

bzr init-repo project
cd project
bzr branch URL trunk

To start a feature branch:

bzr branch trunk featureX
cd featureX

To work:

(make changes)
bzr commit
(make changes)
bzr commit

To publish changes to a mailing list for review & approval:

bzr send

To publish changes to a public branch (that can then be registered as a Launchpad merge request, say):

bzr push [URL]

As a variation, the trunk can be created as a checkout. If you have commit privileges on trunk, that lets you merge into trunk and the commit of the merge will implicitly publish your change. Alternatively, if the trunk URL is read-only (e.g. a http address), that prevents accidental submission this way - ideal if the project workflow uses an automated gatekeeper like PQM, say.

Local sandbox

This layout is very similar to the feature branches layout except that the feature branches share a single working tree rather than having one each. This is similar to git’s default layout and it’s useful for projects with really large trees (> 10000 files say) or for projects with lots of build artifacts (like .o or .class files).

To set up:

bzr init-repo --no-trees project
cd project
bzr branch URL trunk
bzr checkout --lightweight trunk sandbox
cd sandbox

While you could start making changes in sandbox now, committing while the sandbox is pointing to the trunk would mean that trunk is no longer a mirror of the upstream URL (well unless the trunk is a checkout). Therefore, you usually want to immediately create a feature branch and switch your sandbox to it like this:

bzr branch ../trunk ../featureX
bzr switch ../featureX

The processes for making changes and submitting them are otherwise pretty much the same as those used for feature branches.

Advanced layouts

If you wish, you can put together your own layout based on how you like things organized. See Advanced shared repository layouts for examples and inspiration.