Looms Rock

While doing a bit of work on Storm, I decided to try out the loom plugin for Bazaar. The loom plugin is designed to help maintain a stack of changes to a base branch (similar to quilt). Some use cases where this sort of tool are useful include:

  1. Maintaining a long-running diff to a base branch. Distribution packaging is one such example.
  2. While developing a new feature, the underlying code may require some refactoring. A loom could be used to keep the refactoring separate from the feature work so that it can be merged ahead of the feature.
  3. For complex features, code reviewers often prefer to changes to be broken down into a sequence of simpler changes. A loom can help maintain the stack of changes in a coherent fashion.

A loom branch helps to manage these different threads in a coherent manner. Each thread in the loom contains all the changes from the threads below it, so the revision graph ends up looking something like this:

Once the plugin has been installed, a normal branch can be converted to a loom with the "bzr loomify" command. The "bzr create-thread" command can be used to create a new thread above the current one.

The "bzr down-thread" and "bzr up-thread" commands can be used to switch between threads. When going up a thread, a merge will be performed if there are new changes from the lower thread. The "bzr show-loom" command shows the current state of the loom, and which thread is currently selected.

The "bzr export-loom" command can be used to explode the loom, creating a standard branch for each thread. The included HOWTO document gives a more detailed tutorial.

There are a few warts in the UI that I've encountered though:

  1. The "bzr combine-thread" command sounds like it should actually merge two threads. Instead it is an advisory command that can be used to remove a thread once its contents have been merged.
  2. After pulling new changes in from upstream on the bottom thread, it gets a bit tedious bubbling the changes up with "bzr up-thread" and "bzr commit".
  3. As well as committing revisions to individual threads, the "bzr record" command can be used to commit the state of the loom as a whole. I haven't really worked out when I should be using the command.
  4. No indication is given if there are changes in the loom that haven't been recorded with "bzr record". I'd expect some indication from "bzr status" to this effect.
  5. When using looms to break a larger feature down into smaller chunks, it'd be nice to have a command that generated a sequence of merge requests that built on top of each other. This would be the form needed to submit them for review on a mailing list.

Despite the quirks in the interface, it does make the relevant work flows easier. It will be interesting to see how the plugin develops.