Best way to deal with "vendor branch"

[Stefan Monnier]

What's the recommended way to deal with a "vendor" branch?

I use various computers and have things setup as follows:

- a central location to sync.
- each computer does a checkout with binding from that central location.
- an external branch http://remote/external/branch.

Every once in a while I merge from the external branch with "bzr merge".
Now here's my problem.

if my submit_branch is http://remote/external/branch, all works
correctly except: I can't do "bzr diff -r submit:" or "bzr diff -r
ancestor:" when I'm not connected to the internet.

The only work around I could find was to create a local mirror of that
branch and do:

  (cd ../mirror; bzr pull); bzr merge ../mirror

which is inconvenient.  Especially because if I later do

  bzr diff -r ancestor:../mirror

I may not get the right result (in case I did a merge on some other
computer, then pushed it to the central location, then pulled it: the
latest revision merged from http://remote/external/branch is not
guaranteed to already be in ../mirror).

This doesn't seem like an unusual setup, so how do other people do it?


        Stefan