bzr-fastimport and revision-editing

[Ian Clatworthy]

Torsten Bronger wrote:

> So far, I'm the only developer on this project so I could assure
> that no old branches are left.  The question is whether the FI
> format has checksums, or whether the SHA-1's and such are newly
> calculated during the import.

Hi Torsten,

You'd be creating a new repository with fresh checksums.

>> That said, I believe there is 'bzr filter-branch' as part of the
>> fast-export suite, which will help you to generate a new history
>> that looks a lot like the old one, but has bits pruned out, etc.
> 
> You presumably mean "bzr fast-import-filter".  This is indeed
> interesting, although I would lose the complete history of files
> with passwords.  Thus, having an "unfold" equivalent of a branch I
> could tamper with would be prefered.  ;-)

I'm not sure what you mean by "unfold". The recipe you want is something
like:

  bzr fast-export my-branch current.fi
  <filter current.fi to create clean.fi>
  bzr fast-import clean.fi my-new-repo

You'll probably want to write a custom tool to do the filtering as
fast-import-filter is currently not powerful enough to meet your needs.
It can selectively include/exclude files/directories but you want
something more: selectively filtering of file contents. Of course, I'll
gratefully take patches to fast-import-filter to make it more powerful. :-)

One more thing to be aware of: Bazaar stores metadata that fastimport
streams can't hold yet, e.g. multiple authors, branch nicks, revision
properties used by bzr-svn, etc. I'm looking to add options to
fast-export and fast-import to export/import this additional data so
round-tripping is less lossy. That hasn't been done yet though.

Ian C.