Repositories

Repositories in Breezy are where committed information is stored. There is a repository associated with every branch.

Repositories are a form of database. Breezy will usually maintain this for good performance automatically, but in some situations (e.g. when doing very many commits in a short time period) you may want to ask brz to optimise the database indices. This can be done by the ‘brz pack’ command.

By default just running ‘brz init’ will create a repository within the new branch but it is possible to create a shared repository which allows multiple branches to share their information in the same location. When a new branch is created it will first look to see if there is a containing shared repository it can use.

When two branches of the same project share a repository, there is generally a large space saving. For some operations (e.g. branching within the repository) this translates in to a large time saving.

To create a shared repository use the init-shared-repository command (or the alias init-shared-repo). This command takes the location of the repository to create. This means that ‘brz init-shared-repository repo’ will create a directory named ‘repo’, which contains a shared repository. Any new branches that are created in this directory will then use it for storage.

It is a good idea to create a repository whenever you might create more than one branch of a project. This is true for both working areas where you are doing the development, and any server areas that you use for hosting projects. In the latter case, it is common to want branches without working trees. Since the files in the branch will not be edited directly there is no need to use up disk space for a working tree. To create a repository in which the branches will not have working trees pass the ‘–no-trees’ option to ‘init-shared-repository’.

Related commands:

init-shared-repository   Create a shared repository. Use --no-trees to create
                         one in which new branches won't get a working tree.