Local branches with Bazaar?

Question

I've been playing around with Git recently to get a grasp of distributed version control. Now I'm looking at Bazaar, but can't figure out how to make a local branch, i.e. a branch that I do not have to push to when I want to commit changes. With Git, I would do

git branch branch_name

or

git checkout -b branch_name

I can then work in my local branch, committing changes as I go, without having to push changes to a remote repo. When I'm through with the branch, I can merge it to my local master branch. If I want, I can then push those changes to the remote repo.

Is this possible with Bazaar? Bazaar seems much more like SVN, with branches just being separate directories, so maybe not.

Answer 1

Yes, you definitely can do that.

Let's say there's a remote repository at bzr+ssh://foo.com/repo/mainline

You can create a local branch by doing:

bzr branch bzr+ssh://foo.com/repo/mainline local_branch

Now, you can make changes to the local_branch and commit them, and those changes are only in that local directory. e.g.:

cd local_branch
touch foo
bzr add foo
bzr commit -m "Add foo."

That will add foo only in the local branch.

Answer 2

If you set up your repository the correct way, you can work in a similar fashion to git.

cd ~/dev
bzr init-repo
bzr reconfigure --with-no-trees
mkdir branches
bzr branch bzr+ssh://foo.com/repo branches/mainline
bzr checkout --lightweight branches/mainline working

This will create a structure like so:

/dev
    /branches
        /mainline
        <other branches go here>
    /working
        <this is your working tree>

And if you want to make branches, you can do the following:

cd ~/dev/checkout
bzr branch --switch ~/dev/branches/mainline ~/dev/branches/some-feature

and now you'll be in the some-feature branch, which will be at the same point as mainline.