merge local commits to svn repo as svn branch

[Michael Goerz]

Hi,

In my scenario, I want to use bzr to interact with subversion repositories.

So, I start out with a bzr checkout of my repo:
 %localhost:~> bzr co svn://svnhost/repo/trunk trunk
I can make changes and commit them completely transparently to the repository.
Now, suppose I unexpectedly get disconnected  from the network for a while. I
do
 %localhost:~/trunk> bzr unbind
and make several local commits to my bzr branch. Other people continue to work
on the svn repo and make several commits on the trunk there. When I get back on
the network, I do
 %localhost:~/trunk> bzr bind

At this point it seems I have two possibilities to get my changes back to the
central svn repo:

A)
 %localhost:~/trunk> bzr up
 [resolve conflicts]
 %localhost:~/trunk> bzr ci
The result of this is that all my changes appear in a single commit, mashing
together all the local commits I did on my bzr branch. If I've done a lot of
local commits, this does not seem desirable.

B)
 %localhost:~/trunk> bzr merge svn://svnhost/repo/trunk
 %localhost:~/trunk> bzr ci --local -m "Reconciled with trunk HEAD"
 %localhost:~/trunk> bzr svn-push svn://svnhost/repo/trunk
This will make all the local commits that I did while being disconnected
visible to the svn repository. However, the changes that appear to happen in
the individual revisions on the svn server will be somewhat weird. Suppose I
made my bzr branch from the svn repo at R100, and made 2 local commits. Other
people made three commits R101, R102, R103 on the svn server. Now when I push
in my local commits as described above as R104, R105, and R106 for the
"reconciliation commit", it will look like R104 completely undid all the
changes from R101-R103, and R106 reintroduced them.

The problem here is of course that subversion doesn't have true branches in the
way bzr has them and my local bzr branch is flattened into the trunk. And ideal
situation would be to merge my bzr branch into an svn branch (at
svn://repo/branches/my-branch), and then later merge that branch to the trunk
using svn. If I knew in advance that I'm going to be disconnected I could
create the svn branch first, and then to a bzr checkout of that branch. But if
I don't know in advance it would be nice if I could create a branch from the
R100 revision
 %svnhost:~> svn cp -r100 file:///repo/trunk file:///repo/branches/my-branch
and then somehow make my bzr checkout believe that it's a checkout of
my-branch instead of the trunk. 'bzr switch' doesn't work in this case, since
you can't switch while you have local changes.

What would you recommend in a scenario like this?

Thanks,
Michael