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?

Help??  Anybody??


        Stefan