How Do You Move Files Between Branches

[Neil Martinsen-Burrell]

Kenneth Loafman <kenneth <at> loafman.com> writes:

> I have the following situation (all separate branches):
> 
>    +---demo1
>    +---demo2
>    +---tech
> 
> Demo1 and Demo2 are two demonstrations for shared 'tech'.  Late one
> night I created and checked in a file to demo1 that contained routines
> that should be in tech.  It has since been modified a couple of times.
> 
> Is there a clean way in bzr to move that file from demo1 to tech so that
> the history is maintained?

There is not a simple way to move files between branches with history.  In fact,
there isn't a way to copy files within a branch with history (although the
latter capability is on the drawing board).  It is possible that someone may be
able to suggest a solution based around rebase (which seems to make all
operations possible) but I don't know how to do it.  You could of course fake it
with a sequence (how many revisions of the file are we talking about?) of ``bzr
cat`` calls such as:

export ADDED=5 # added in revision 5 to tech
bzr cat -r $ADDED demo1/file > tech/file
bzr ci -m 'first log message' tech/file
bzr cat -r $(($ADDED+1)) demo1/file > tech/file
bzr ci -m 'will error harmlessly if file didnt change in that revision' tech/file
[etc.]

The appropriate bash for-loop is left as an exercise for the reader :)

-Neil