bzr-svn branching schemes

[Russ Brown]

Apologies for the length of this...

Can anyone point me at more information on bzr-svn branching schemes 
than is documented by bzr help svn-branching-schemes?

I've finally checked out our rather large (24345 revision) subversion 
trunk, creating a shared repository (excluding the checkout itself) of 
about 600M.

Fantastic. So I try checking out another branch from the repository and 
as expected it's quick (well, as quick as any 400M working copy would 
take to check out) and updating both checkouts works just fine (if a tad 
slower than I'd like, but that's a another story).

The acid test for me was merging between branches. We use svk at the 
moment so I'm very much hoping that bzr-svn's support for svk allows me 
to start using svk transparently to other users (with a view to moving 
them all to bzr following the evaluation).

Unfortunately, merging isn't working. When I try to merge trunk into the 
branch I checked out, I get this:

bzr: ERROR: Branches have no common ancestor, and no merge base revision 
was specified.

This happens whether I provide a relative link to my bzr trunk checkout 
or an svn:// URL to trunk on the svn server.

Now, our branching scheme is a tad haphazard. Initially we started with 
the generic trunk/branches/tags scheme, but this quickly became ugly as 
the number of branches grew. So we started creating directories under 
/branches for different branch categories, and created branches in there.

So there is no actual 'scheme' that applies to the whole of the 
repository's history.

I was hoping for some scheme that would simple recognise 'all copies of 
trunk (recursive)' as being branches, since that would work in our case 
(and most others I'd imagine too).

Looking at scheme.py, I suppose I could use the 'list' scheme, but that 
involves fiddling that I'm sure my colleagues won't be too happy about 
having to do. I also can't find any details on how to use it: could 
anyone provide any?

I really hope I can get this working: if I can we're likely to give 
bzr-svn and bzr itself a really good workout over the coming weeks as we 
evaluate it for a possible full switch.

-- 

Russ.