Getting a branch?

[Neil Martinsen-Burrell]

Dimitris Mouchritsas <dimitris.mouchritsas <at> eurodyn.com> writes:

 I'm kind of new in Bazaar and I'm trying to use it in a company that's 
> hard on CVS. I've also involved another developer in the team to use
> bazaar and try to collaborate. So we have two machines each having its 
> own project folder. In my machine I also have another folder from which 
> I serve the project for bazaar through sftp (windows 2k btw). The 
> problem is the other developer accidentally erased the .bzr directory on 
> project so he's out of bzr version control. What should I do so he can 
> get back on track? The files that he has are the same as mine, so I 
> don't want bazaar to treat them as new. If he deletes the folder and use 
> bzr branch then we will loose all CVS information. What should I do?

If your project directory has the same files as his had, and your project
directory is checked in to bazaar ("bzr status" shows no changes), then doing
"bzr push SERVER_DIRECTORY" from your directory and then having the other
developer do "bzr branch sftp://HOST/SERVER_DIRECTORY" will give the other
developer a full bzr branch *with all history from your branch*.

If the other developer had history in his branch which is not incorporated into
your branch by merging, then that history is probably gone.  The .bzr directory
is where Bazaar stores *all* of its history information, so deleting that
directory deletes the historical information (in general; use of shared
repositories, created by "bzr init-repo" may mean that history is stored
elsewhere, but I don't think that history is recoverable without the branch
information from .bzr).

I hope that you are able to get the two of you back on track with Bazaar and win
a couple of converts.  Try renaming some directories and then merging changes
across multiple files.  That should impress people.

-Neil