Using bzr with NetBeans

NetBeans is a popular IDE for Java which has inbuilt support for SVN and CVS. However, it lacks inbuilt support for bzr. While making my Networks project, I worked with project, I used centralized bzr for source management and as my team-mates were on Windows and I on Linux, we had a few adjustment problems. Hence, a sketch of the steps I used to get a bzr server up and running on my system.

• Setting up bzr: Most of the material can be found at the manual
  1. Installed bzr , bzrtools , and bzr-gtk . The last is not necessary, but extremely useful.
  2. Introduced myself to bzr, using the whoami command.
  3. Made a new user 'networksproject' and gave it necessary privileges. Normal privileges should not be a problem if you are sure nothing malicious is going to happen to your machine. However, as other will need to connect to this user remotely, one should not curtail ssh rights.
  4. Logged in using the new account to make a repository(folder) named networksproject with three trunks(folders) corresponding to three legs of the project.
  5. Logged back as the native user and then followed the second way as described in the manual to first checkout an empty trunk, copied existing bits of code and then commit the changes.
  6. To check it out from any machine:
     

     	  bzr checkout sftp://networksproject@musicallyut-laptop-address/~/networksproject/MakeChunk
     

• Setting up bzr for NetBeans However, things did not go very smoothly when we started cross compiling and trying to run things. Nevertheless, once on the road, we learned the correct way of doing it. Hence, the purported correct procedure to follow seems to be:
  1. NEVER share the entire project folder. We spent considerable time and energy in weeding out files that were result of compilations and were not portable. Finally, we put the following in our .bzrignore file in the project directory before the first commit/checkout :

     	*.class
     	*.jar
     	dist
     	build
     	nbproject
     	build.xml
     

  2. Once the skeleton project folder (without the above mentioned files) has been checkout , then in NetBeans, make a new project, choose the option to make it using existing sources and then import the sources. This will make the platform dependent build scripts, making it much easier to work even from the command line.
  3. The dependencies will need to be resolved only once on each machine if the above procedure is followed. Otherwise, as the nbproject folder is overwritten on different platform, Java finds it difficult to track dependencies among the projects after each commit.

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