Bazaar

Request for doc update for users migration from VSS

Bug #730549 reported by Ben Simons
6
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Bazaar
Fix Released
Undecided
Adrian Wilkins

Bug Description

Hello

VSS (Microsoft Visual Source Safe) has a feature called "shared items". A shared file is available in mutilple places and can be checked in/out at these places. Think about a file you need at several places

Sample use:
In Visual Studio so called "Projects" have an AssemblyInfo.cs file which contains the version of the project. We now have an AssemblyInfo.cs which contains the names of the project and an AssemblyInfoAll.cs which contains the version number. If we change the version number we only change it at one place and issue a "getlatest" command afterwards which updates all AssemblyInfoAll.cs in all projects.

I had some discussions at freenode bazaar IRC channel a few weeks ago. They and the documentation (http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/migration/en/survival/bzr-for-vss-users.html) agreed, there is no such feature in Bazaar.

This missing feature is therefore an obstacle for VSS users to move to Bazaar.

But there is a workaround. One can add a file in a Visual studio project as a link. Only relative paths as it seems, but this not bad. When referencing the file only by link instead of relaying on a physically exiting file, one can easily migrate to Bazaar.

it would be cool, if someone can add this to the vss migration page. I did a lot of reasarch and finally gave up moving to Bazaar because we had shared files until i knew this workaround. This info would probably help others too.

A short mention of "file as link" at these two places would help:
http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/migration/en/data-migration/sourcesafe-to-bazaar.html
http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/migration/en/survival/bzr-for-vss-users.html

Thanks for your work
Ben

See original description

Related branches

lp://qastaging/~adrian-wilkins/bzr-migration-docs/share-and-pin
Vincent Ladeuil: Approve
Diff: 71 lines (+52/-0)
2 files modified
en/data-migration/sourcesafe-to-bazaar.txt (+50/-0)
en/survival/bzr-for-vss-users.txt (+2/-0)
Ben Simons (zuiopl)
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Ben Simons (zuiopl) wrote :

OK, as I reread it now. This is only possible for VSS users working with Visual Studio. But the coverage of this combination is probably 99% or so...

Revision history for this message
Adrian Wilkins (adrian-wilkins) wrote :

I wrote the pages in question ; I'm sorry this issue didn't get covered to start with. This is something I first went through a long time ago when migrating from VSS to Subversion and since then it's been my habit to avoid this situation, so it didn't really occur to me.

I'll commit some extra material to the "Migration" page. Your solution is one of the things we used to do to solve this problem.

Other ways we used to get around this in SVN included using the "svn:externals" feature - moving groups of library routines into a folder at the root level, but checking them out using svn:externals into each project tree that required them. Bazaar has some plugins (like bzr-externals) for this sort of purpose but my experience with them is not large. If you you do try them out perhaps you could contribute some documentation to the page (you can get it by branching lp:bzr-migration-docs), that would both be very helpful and provide you with a free backup of your process documentation...

These are all things that compensate for the lack of symlinks on Windows - which is no longer the case on Vista and up, but Python and Bazaar have not quite caught up with this yet, which is fair enough because neither has the Windows shell. :-) Symlinks require admin privileges by default on Windows and are currently really only there to improve compatibility with software that originated on POSIX platforms.

Vincent Ladeuil (vila)
Changed in bzr:
assignee: nobody → Adrian Wilkins (adrian-wilkins)
status: New → In Progress
status: In Progress → Fix Released
Revision history for this message
Ben Simons (zuiopl) wrote :

Thanks for that added text in the docs !
I generously overlook the VB file samples.....I just shivered and had to rub my hurt eyes... run!!!!.. VB code.....to the bunker!!!

Ok, a bit dramatic ;-)

Thanks again
Ben

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