Bzr-svn and bzr repositories.

[Kevin Kubasik]

Hey all! First, I'd like to introduce myself, my name is Kevin
Kubasik, I'm a member of The Gnome Foundation and a generally Ubuntuy
guy (although always looking to offload packaging duties if someones
interested ;). I met some of you guys at PyCon in Chicago, but for the
rest of you, thats the closest I got to a hello ;)

Now, all in all, the problem I'm having really isn't too bad, more of
an irk. I use bzr->bzr-svn->gnome svn as my standard development
model, I branch off of SVN and keep local feature branches. Now, I had
heard of the whole repository concept, but never really understood the
use case for it until I saw developers living in them. I've started to
make a habit out of the repository model to significantly shrink my
home directory, but I have one problem. The following doesn't work,
and in many ways it makes sense why (svn != bzr), but it would be
really cool if someone knew of a workaround, or even a real fix.

mkdir beagle-repo
cd beagle-repo
bzr init-repo .
bzr branch svn+ssh://svn.gnome.org/svn/beagle/trunk beagle-trunk

Gives me:
bzr: ERROR: Repository
KnitPackRepository('file:///home/kkubasik/mysrc/beagle-repo/.bzr/repository/')
is not compatible with repository
SvnRepository('svn+ssh://svn.gnome.org/svn/beagle')

Since the root of my workflow still has to end up back in the Gnome
SVN servers, I don't see a real option except:

bzr branch svn+ssh://svn.gnome.org/svn/beagle/trunk beagle-trunk
mkdir beagle-repo
cd beagle-repo
bzr init-repo .
bzr branch ../beagle-trunk ./beagle-trunk-repo

And while that might work (I haven't tried it, while bzr-svn has made
_great_ improvements, its still tedious enough to want to avoid new
branches from remote sources when possible.) it seems like a very
haphazard means of accomplishing my goal, and (more importantly)
muddles my revision history which scares me (I don't wanna be stuck 6
months from now with 2 branches that are the same, but for a fluke
reason don't share a root and can't magic-merge)

Anyways, I know its not a very clear, concise or well thought out
question, but it bothered me this afternoon, and its not exactly a
bug, so I figured the cure must be: lively conversation ;)

Cheers,
Kevin Kubasik


http://kubasik.net/blog