Working with another
====================

Peer-to-peer rocks
------------------

In many cases, two minds can be better than one. You may be the one
who started a project and someone wishes to help, or perhaps it's you
who wants to help another. Perhaps you are both members of a larger
team that have been assigned a task together as pair programmers.
Either way, two people need to agree on a process, a set of
guidelines and a toolset in order to work together effectively.

Imagine if you were not allowed to call someone on the phone directly
and the only way to talk to them was by registering a conference call first?
Companies and communities that only share code via a central VCS
repository are living with a similar straitjacket to that every day.
There are times when central control makes a lot of sense and times
when peer-to-peer rocks. Either way, Bazaar is designed to help.

The partner workflow
--------------------

While it's certainly not the only way to do it, the *partner workflow*
below is a good starting point for a pair of people who wish to
collaborate using Bazaar.

.. image:: images/workflows_peer.png

Over and above the tasks covered in the previous chapter, this
chapter introduces two essential collaboration activities:

 * getting a copy of a branch
 * merging changes between branches.

Even when it's just you working on a code base, it can be very useful
to keep multiple branches around (for different releases say) and
to merge changes between them as appropriate. Your "partner" may indeed
be yourself.