bzr-svn branching schemes

[Russ Brown]

Russ Brown wrote:
> 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.
> 

Apologies for replying to my own post, but is there nobody who can offer 
any tips or advice as to where I should go next with this? It would be a 
shame to have come so far only to have to give up because of one 
obstacle, especially having come so far already.