Re: [stellation-res] Windows Issues

["Mark C. Chu-Carroll" <mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 20 August 2002 11:18 pm, Jonathan Gossage wrote:
> >to really grasp what lightweight branches really *mean*. Save/Restore
> >is a really neat idea, but during my one brief look through it, I realized
> >that it looked a *lot* like an implementation of a branch in the
>
> repository.
>
> >This led me to the realization that save/restore is really doing nothing
>
> but
>
> >providing a private local branch in the workspace.  The only real
>
> difference
>
> >between s/r and a private branch is that s/r discards things to save
> > space, and s/r works when you're not connected to the repository. Our
> > tentative
>
> plans
>
> >are to sunset the s/r functionality and replace them with private branches
> >once we have heirarchical replication working.)
> >
> >	-Mark
>
> This is one of the things that attracts me to Stellation. What I would like
> to be able to do is to be able to interrupt my work at any time when I
> recognize an unrelated bug in the code or need to do a refactoring. I would
> like to perform the bug fix or refactoring in a separate branch, possibly
> off the main stream, check this in and then refresh the original branch I
> was working on from the repository.

You've got it. It's a really surprising thing. Branches are such a simple 
notion in theory. But they're really pretty subtle. There's so much that you 
can do if you get branches *right*.  I've found it to be almost Zen-like, 
where you keep thinking about these things for a while, and then
it hits you what it *really* means to have cheap branches at your disposal
all the time. It totally changes the way that you think about how you interact
with the system and with the other programmers that you're working with.
(I'm actually working on an article for the IBM DeveloperWorks website, called 
"The Zen of Branching", which tries to describe how to really take advantage 
of branches in a system like Stellation or ClearCase.)

	-Mark


-- 
Mark Craig Chu-Carroll,  IBM T.J. Watson Research Center  
*** The Stellation project: Advanced SCM for Collaboration
***		http://www.eclipse.org/stellation
*** Work Email: mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx  ------- Personal Email: markcc@xxxxxxxxxxx