Bazaar 1.6 in Hardy

[Andrew Bennetts]

Martin Albisetti wrote:
> Currently we have bzr 1.3.1 in Hardy, and, unfortunately, a few of
> small issues are creating recurring problems for users which drop by
> #launchpad that have been fixed since then.
> The top 2 are:
> 
> 1.Users pushing to lp:project and get a "can't write to http" error,
> instead of what we have en 1.4+, which is instructions that the user
> should run launchpad-login first. This is especially bad since a
> directory gets created in LP when you try to push through http
> (probably a bug in LP), so the user has to use --use-existing-dir
> *one* time, which adds to the confusion.

The patch in 1.4 vs. 1.3.1 is pretty trivial.  The hardy package could just
backport that to 1.3.1 I think.

> 2. When a branch is locked, the message in 1.3 is unhelpful, and the
> changes I did to it to make it clearer landed in 1.5.

Similarly, this patch was pretty trivial too, and should be easy to backport.

> We probably get 3 or 4 users per day in #launchpad with these 2
> problems, so I expect a lot more being hit by these issues which are
> easily avoidable.

I think you're right.  It would be great to get these fixes into Hardy.  I'd be
happy to extract patches for those two issues it would help someone make an
improved 1.3.1 package to propose for hardy-updates.

> Those 2, plus stacked branches seem like a good reason to try and push
> bzr 1.6 into hardy.
> 
> I know this isn't something that is usually permitted, but I think
> it's worth trying.

I personally don't think we should rush 1.6 into Hardy.  It's a very big
release, with many new features and lots of under-the-hood changes.  The risk of
it having unexpected bugs is I think a bit higher than our average release.  I'm
not very familiar with Hardy's policies, but I think they'd want to be a bit
more conservative than to take such a large and new release.

For curiosity's sake, here's the diffstat summary for 1.4 -> 1.5:

 230 files changed, 5377 insertions(+), 3399 deletions(-)

And here's the diffstat summary for 1.5 -> bzr.dev (excluding an SVG file):

 252 files changed, 22220 insertions(+), 12547 deletions(-)

-Andrew.