Best way to deal with "vendor branch"

Stefan Monnier monnier at iro.umontreal.ca
Tue Apr 8 03:22:05 BST 2008


>> 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?
>> 
>> 

> Hi Stefan,

> Sorry about not responding sooner. I've got to say that I don't quite
> understand this set up.

> - You have an external branch: http://remote/external/branch.
> - You periodically merge this branch into your central location,
> bzr://central/branch.
> - You work with checkouts bound to bzr://central/branch
> - Your issue is that when you are offline, you don't have access to
> 'remote'. It's not clear from your email whether you have access to
> 'central' either.

I don't have access to central either, but it doesn't matter since the
checkout includes a full copy: other than pull and push, access to
central makes no difference anyway.

> - You want to be able to do 'bzr diff -r submit:' from a checkout,
> even when you are offline.

Yes.

> Is this a fair summary of your set-up and issue?

Yes.  Actually, the central branch is probably irrelevant to the question.


        Stefan



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