Tracking Third-Party Sources (Vendor Branches)?

[Matthieu Moy]

Bob Tanner wrote:
> Maybe my years of cvs usage has caused my brain to rot, but I cannot seem to
> figure out how to use bzr to track 3rd part sources like I do in cvs.

Well, you don't really need to distinguish between vendor branch and any
other branch.

1st scenario: the upstream is managed with bzr:
Then, you "bzr branch" to get your local branch, hack (and possibly
commit) on it, and use "bzr merge" to get the new upstream version.
If your changes are interesting for upstream, you can publish your
branch and request a merge, wait for the changesets implementation to
send a changeset by email (this will probably come in 0.9 or so), or use
"bzr diff -r ancestor:....." to get a patch.

2nd scenario: the upstream is _not_ managed with bzr:
Then, the simplest is to import their branch in a local bzr branch. For
GNU Arch branches, you have baz_import in bzrtools, for others, look at
tailor ( http://www.darcs.net/DarcsWiki/Tailor ).
Then, proceed as in the first scenario (except that you can't directly
request a merge).

For Subversion branches, you can also look at
http://bazaar-vcs.org/BzrForeignBranches/Subversion which is still
experimental, but sounds very promising to me.

-- 
Matthieu