workflow/merge question

[Sebastian Kuzminsky]

Hi folks, I've been a happy bazaar user for many months.  I love the 
highly usable command-line interface, but what really sold me on bzr 
(over git and hg) is the flexible architecture of repositories, 
branches, and working trees.

... But I've got a problem.  It may be I dont understand how to use 
merge, or maybe my workflow is wrong for bzr.

I'm working on a multi-developer open-source project where the main 
shared revision control system is CVS (boo, hiss).

I checked out the central CVS tree and committed the working tree to a 
bzr branch called "upstream" in a shared (but private) repo here 
locally.  Periodically I'll do something like this to keep my bzr 
"upstream" branch in sync with the main CVS repo:

     cvs update
     bzr add ...
     bzr rm ...
     bzr commit


I branched my "upstream" bzr branch to "local", and I'm doing all my 
development there.  I periodically "bzr merge --pull" from "upstream" to 
"local" to keep my development tree in sync with the rest of the 
developers' CVS tree.

When I've got something ready to share with the other developers, I 
merge it (anything from a single commit to several commits) from "local" 
to "upstream", "bzr commit" in my upstream, and then "cvs commit" to 
send it to the main CVS repo for the project.

The commits i merge from local to my upstream branch are not always the 
the "top of tree" in local, and they're not always contiguous with the 
other commits  i've merged, or even sequential.  For example, I might 
have 50 revs in "local"; one day I merge revs 10 and 20-25 to "upstream" 
and send that on, and the next day I merge revs 5, 15, and 35 and send 
those on as another CVS commit.


Now, I bet all you bzr gurus know how this gets problematic for me.  I 
believe bzr (1.3.0) doesnt handle cherry-picked commits, and then when 
merging back and forth it gets confused and I get all these merge 
conflicts and stuff...  :-(

Is there something I can do to make my life easier?  Change how I merge, 
change my workflow, anything?


-- 
Sebastian Kuzminsky
If you need a machine today and don't buy it,
tomorrow you will have paid for it and not have it.  -- Henry Ford