upstream, branching, diverging, merging oh my!

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Bob Tanner wrote:
...

> Of course openvpn progress didn't stop, upstream kept changing, but I
> ignored it in bliss, until today, when I realized I should be pulling
> upstream changes into my "branch". So:
> 
> cd /usr/src/openvpn
> bzr init
> bzr add
> bzr commit 

If you had changed it to:

bzr init
bzr add --file-ids-from ../mybranch
bzr commit

> 
> I know enough about bzr to know I cannot do a  normal 'bzr merge' to these
> repositories. There is no common ancestor.
> 
> My gut tells me I should be able some how branch /usr/src/openvpn
> into /tmp/openvpn and merge my ~/project/openvpn changes into /tmp/openvpn
> and magically make /tmp/openvpn my ~/project/openvpn.
> 
> Just copying the files from ~/project/openvpn into /tmp/openvpn causes a
> loss of changelog/history.
> 
> Is there some way to do what I'm trying?


My gut feeling says you want to do:

bzr branch -r 1 current upstream
cd upstream
bzr import ../openvpn-1.0.0.tar.gz .
bzr commit -m "version 1.0.0"
bzr import ../openvpn-1.0.1.tar.gz .
bzr commit -m "version 1.0.1"

...

(import is provide by bzrtools. You could also do "rm -r *; tar xvzf;
bzr add; ...)


This gives you a branch which tracks the upstream releases.

Now you just need to declare that your working branch has merged *some*
of them, but not all of them.

cd ../current
bzr merge -r LAST_MERGED ../upstream
# This will probably conflict, but all we really want is a record that
we consider them sync'd at that point.
bzr revert .
           ^- significant as it indicates to revert the tree
contents/conflicts, but not the pending merge
bzr commit -m "marking LAST_MERGED as merged from upstream"

- From here on out, you can do:

bzr merge ../upstream

And it should merge any new changes.

And when upstream releases a new tarball simply:

cd upstream
bzr import ../open-vpn-X.Y.Z.tar.gz
bzr commit -m "official version X.Y.Z"
cd ../current
bzr merge ../upstream


Some of this is discussed in:
http://bazaar-vcs.org/TrackingUpstream

John
=:->
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