Peer-to-peer rocks

In many cases, two minds can be better than one. You may be the one who started a project and someone wishes to help, or perhaps it’s you who wants to help another. Perhaps you are both members of a larger team that have been assigned a task together as pair programmers. Either way, two people need to agree on a process, a set of guidelines and a toolset in order to work together effectively.

Imagine if you were not allowed to call someone on the phone directly and the only way to talk to them was by registering a conference call first? Companies and communities that only share code via a central VCS repository are living with a similar straitjacket to that every day. There are times when central control makes a lot of sense and times when peer-to-peer rocks. Either way, Bazaar is designed to help.

The partner workflow

While it’s certainly not the only way to do it, the partner workflow below is a good starting point for a pair of people who wish to collaborate using Bazaar.

Over and above the tasks covered in the previous chapter, this chapter introduces two essential collaboration activities:

• getting a copy of a branch
• merging changes between branches.

Even when it’s just you working on a code base, it can be very useful to keep multiple branches around (for different releases say) and to merge changes between them as appropriate. Your “partner” may indeed be yourself.