
Syncing and merging come to Bitbucket - srijan4
http://blog.bitbucket.org/2013/02/04/syncing-and-merging-come-to-bitbucket/
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randlet
This seems like a really nice feature! At work I maintain an open source
project but also have a private fork containing customizations just for our
centre. This should make it very very easy to keep my private repo in sync
with the public version.

BitBucket has been pushing a lot of nice features lately!

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prawks
I think on the whole, github and BitBucket are very refreshing. They both come
out with great ideas, and it fosters a very, very healthy space in which to
provide services to users (source code hosting, versioning, and management).

It is also a space that _every_ developer should become intimate with, and I
think it's great that it's been brought to the forefront of software
development like it has, especially for the visibility it has to new
developers. When I started my bachelors in CS 5 years ago, I didn't have
source control until my 2nd/3rd year, now it's something at the forefront of
learning to program.

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happypeter
In my daily workflow, a feature branch is there on the server mostly for it's
part of a already-sent pull request. So in this case, do a syncing does not
make any sense.

For a feature branch from my local clone, I do love to sync with
upstream/master as often as I can, but I can do it quickly and
knowingly(rebase or merge) with command line.

So for me, thanks but no thanks.

But I do know a lot people use the remote feature branch as a tmp backup of
the WIP feather branch, in this case, the fact that you can quickly sync with
upstream/master does help, but what if you click "sync branch" and merge
conflicts happen?

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GhotiFish
I'm a bit green to the workflow my self, but I agree with you, this doesn't
seem to add anything.

Why is having the server doing the merge advantageous to doing the merge
locally?

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brown9-2
From the blog post: _without ever needing to go to the command line_. So I
think their goal is to make things even easier for users that have trouble (or
don't like) the command line.

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balac
Its nice to see Bitbucket moving away from simply copying the design and
featureset of Github. The newer design and features like this are very
welcome.

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Jagat
As a graduate student, I prefer bitbucket to github for maintaining my
codebase for course projects and homework assignments, for the simple reason
that it provides free private repositories. For the sake of maintaining
academic integrity, making my course projects and assignments public is not
recommended till the course ends.

~~~
aspir
It may not be enough, but GitHub does provide free private repos for students
-- <https://github.com/edu>

~~~
Jagat
Oh cool. I just registered. Thanks!

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speeder
I use Bitbucket (because it allows for private projects, I use in the
company), and this feature sounds very interesting.

It is great when you can just fork a thing, and keep working on it, and
Bitbucket keeps it synced for you, without you needing to remember to pull
every day.

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lvh
I'm not sure how this works. Does it rebase?

On an unrelated note, I think it's pretty funny you can sign in to Bitbucket
using your Github account :) Reminds me of how I signed into Bitbucket for
years using my Launchpad OpenID :D

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borplk
Can someone guide me on how you'd normally sync feature branches?

If you have already pushed the feature branch, doesn't rebasing mess things up
because the parent and hence the hash of the commits in that branch change?

My feature branches get outdated compared to the master and I'd like to sync
them with master and make it merge-ready so I can create a pull request and
someone can seamlessly merge it in.

~~~
speg
Yes, I usually keep the feature branch on my machine and rebase master on to
it every day. I would also like to know how to push it while continually
rebasing it on top of master.

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tunnuz
For what it's worth, I think that the service Bitbucket.org is offering is
great and these guys are doing a really good job.

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qwerta
I feel my next project will be hosted on Bitbucket rather than github :-)

First they removed downloads and now they do not have this useful feature :-)

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atechie
Downloads is a valid missing (or rather removed) feature, but as others have
pointed out, this feature at core is not very different from rebase.

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markokocic
Neither is fork or pull request something that you can't do easily without
Bitbucket and Github, but people still use them mainly because those two sites
make it easier for them to fork a project and keep the fork up to date. I
guess it's all about convenience, and time will tell if people will use it.

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IgorPartola
Glad that BitBucket is developing original features. It's a great alternative
to GitHub especially since the pricing is so much saner.

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hcarvalhoalves
Bitbucket has the potential to become much better than GitHub - as long as
they keep filling feature holes like these - since they're not tied to just
one DCVS.

For the first time, I feel compelled to set some time aside and test the
service throughout. GitHub stability/availability has been lacking lately, and
a better bug tracker would be useful.

~~~
holman
> since they're not tied to just one DCVS.

Just for the record, neither is GitHub. :) We've supported Subversion for
almost three years now.

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deelowe
I think he means hg(mercurial). I don't think svn is considered a DCVS, though
the fact that you guys support traditional CVS is great.

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msellout
Does the hg-git extension (<http://hg-git.github.com/>) not suffice?

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johnm
It's a definite help but no.

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anton_gogolev
It can't possibly be rebasing since the changesets on BitBucket are
"published" in HG parlance and cannot be rewritten. I'm assuming it does
simple merges.

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deepak-kumar
Wow, tried it and I am already liking this feature. Always helps to know where
my fork stands w.r.t. parent repo. Way to go Bitbucket, keep it coming!

