luhman.org

I ran across an interesting open source program called Scmbug. Scmbug is a system that integrates software configuration management with bug-tracking.

I was looking for a tool that would help with :

• Showing what bugs are fixed in a particular build or revision control commit?
• Automatically updating a bug tracker when bugs are completed (fixed) and approved.
• Not allowing unapproved bugs to be committed to a given branch.

Here are some useful BitKeeper commands :

Help

• bk helptool &

Repository Management

• bk clone -l /home/usr/dluhman/repos/code /tmp/devdkl-test/code
• bk parent
• bk pull -ln
• bk citool
• bk push -ln

File Management

• bk new somefile.php
• bk edit someExistingFile.php
• bk -Ur. edit -S
• bk mv oldFileName.php newFileName.php

Examining Changes & Reporting

• bk revtool
• bk csettool -r1.6887.1.60 &
• bk log -r1.6887.1.61
• bk changes -uUSERNAME
• bk changes -r1.6887.1.61
• bk changes -v -r1.6887.1.61

Let's say you need to backport a fix from one BitKeeper repository to another. Here's one way to do it. I suppose there are other or better ways to apply a patch, especially if you have a lot of changesets to backport. But if you're limited to a few changesetd, this seems to work for me.

The following documentation is useful :
http://www.bitkeeper.com/Documentation.FAQS.Linux.html

1. Create personal clone of target repository :

 
$ pwd
/usr/me 
$ mkdir target
$ cd target
$ bk clone /share/source/code code

As far as I know, BitKeeper does not seem to support the notion of "local" (intra-repository) branches.

Git supports these, and I've found them very useful. With Git, you can easily have debug/test branches without the overhead or config issues of an entirely different repo. I've even used one branch per bug so I can have several things in the air before merging them into the master branch.

The only way I can see to do this in BitKeeper is to have separate repos, which wastes disk space and adds the trouble of creating and managing separate directory trees in the file system.

I'm more familiar with Git and its merge process, but I also use BitKeeper and sometimes run into merge conflicts. Here's some info on how to handle them.

Unlike Git, BitKeeper doesn't have the notion of "local" branches, so all merges are from push/pull operations. BitKeeper has a merge command, but it's for merging single files, rather than merging one local branch into another.

Let's say that you have a backend build system with BitKeeper dependencies. If you want to do most of your development with Git, while still keeping the BitKeeper backend, here's one way how to do it.

The basic strategy here is to create a new BK repository which will have a git index inside it.

Clone BK repository

$ bk clone /code /home/usr/dkl/repos/code
$ touch /code/mycode/.gitignore
$ bk ignore .gitignore
$ bk ignore 'mycode/.git -prune'
$ bk citool (check in these ignores)