Bazaar is another DistributedSCM (see http://bazaar-vcs.org/).
A Bazaar "branch" roughly corresponds to a Mercurial repository. Bazaar's "branch" command corresponds to "clone" in Mercurial.
Comparing Use Cases
Push
Bazaar
In Bazaar, the push command has an --overwrite option which modifies the history of the target branch (provided the target branch was not explicitly created using the --append-revisions-only option, see addendum below). Example:
Assume we have a Bazaar branch in directory bzr1 (created with "bzr init") and branched that to bzr1-1 (using bzr branch bzr1 bzr1-1). Then we commit some changes in both branches, thus making the branches diverge.
Then in bzr1-1 doing:
> bzr push ..\bzr1 bzr: ERROR: These branches have diverged. Try using "merge" and then "push".
will fail because the two branches have diverged.
But specifying --overwrite will succeed:
> bzr push ..\bzr1 --overwrite All changes applied successfully. Pushed up to revision 2.
by changing the history of bzr1. Some already committed changes to branch bzr1 are deleted (the diverging changes). Quote from Bazaar manual: "If branches have diverged, you can use 'bzr push --overwrite' to replace the other branch completely, discarding its unmerged changes."
Addendum: If branch bzr1 is created using
bzr init --append-revisions-only
(see bzr init), then push --overwrite will be denied if the branches have diverged:
> bzr push ..\bzr1 --overwrite bzr: ERROR: Operation denied because it would change the main history, which is not permitted by the append_revisions_only setting on branch "C:/tmp/bzr1/".
So this ensures that pushes cannot change existing history (however, this is not the default behaviour).
Mercurial
In Mercurial, it is not possible to delete already committed changesets when doing a push.
Assume we have two Mercurial repositories hg1 and hg1-1 (hg1-1 cloned at some time from hg1) with diverging changes. In hg1-1 doing:
> hg push ..\hg1 pushing to ..\hg1 searching for changes abort: push creates new remote branches! (did you forget to merge? use push -f to force)
will fail as with bzr push. But doing:
> hg push --force ..\hg1 pushing to ..\hg1 searching for changes adding changesets adding manifests adding file changes added 1 changesets with 1 changes to 1 files (+1 heads)
simply adds a new head to the target repository. History is preserved. (Sidenote: This is inherent in Mercurial, as the underlying revlog format used for all versioned information in Mercurial is append only by design).
General Comparison
bzr wins a performance test, by Bryan O'Sullivan, Fri Jan 18 15:33:47 CST 2008
See also
References
Bazaar User Reference (manual)