bzr graft or equivalent?

[Fernando Perez]

Hi all,

I'm new to the list and relatively new to bzr.  I lead the ipython project, and
we recently switched from svn to bzr.  When testing the switch, our SVN server
was having memory problems and launchpad could never complete a full download
of the svn history to start working from. So one of the ipython devs just made
an initial bzr import with zero svn history and uploaded that  to launchpad,
so we could see if we liked the workflow.

Now we're happy and we want to fully abandon the svn support, but we'd like to
bring the old history in (years) and merge it with the recent work done in bzr
(3 months). So bzr-graft sounds exactly made for this, but unfortunately it
doesn't load in current bzr:

http://spacepants.org/src/bzrgraft

I have tried a number of things, including a rebase, semi-automated creation of
bundles revision by revision to try to apply them later, and more, without
success.  I even tried bzr svn-push, since I still have the live SVN repo: I
made a branch there and tried to push the new bzr history onto that branch,
but bzr svn-push failed with 'branches have diverged' errors.

To summarize, we have:

SVN development: past .... -> Feb 2008.
BZR development:              Feb 2008 -> Today.

The SVN trunk is now even available from launchpad, because the import
eventually completed.  Both branches can be obtained via:

bzr branch lp:~vcs-imports/ipython/main/ ipython-svn
bzr branch lp:ipython ipython-current

So all I want to do is to literally 'concatenate' these two into a single line
of development, like bzr graft promises to do.  There are no conflicts between
the two branches, because the moment we started using bzr we stopped touching
SVN, so this *should* be doable.  But so far, no luck.

If anyone has a simple suggestion of how to do this (that doesn't involve
learning the whole bzr API to resurrect graft, unfortunately I don't have the
time nor interest in doing that), I'd be very grateful.  If it's complicated,
we'll just ditch the last three months of history and update the branch that
has the full svn history with all the recent changes in one gigantic commit
and move on.  But at least I'd like to give this one last chance.

Thanks!

f