Using Launchpad/bzr with a subversion-based project

[Joseph Wakeling]

Hello everyone,

I'm hoping you can give me some advice about how Launchpad and bzr can
be used with a project that's svn-based.

Some colleagues of mine have code hosted in a 'private' svn repository
that's accessible via https:// to those with a valid username and
password.  (My access right now is broken thanks to the bzr-svn https://
bug, but that's another story:-)

(I think I'm correct in saying that the password protection applies only
to push/write access, and not to pull.)

I gave them a demo of Launchpad yesterday and they were impressed, and
keen to see if they could use it as a support tool for their work.  They
want to maintain the main svn repository, but use Launchpad/bzr on top
of it as a code management tool and to assist decentralised work.

So, the question is, what are our options for doing this?  The obvious
one -- and what seems to be implied from the Launchpad documentation --
is that one person (the maintainer) branches or checks out from svn
using bzr-svn and then pushes to a bzr branch on Launchpad: then
everyone else interacts with this branch, and the maintainer takes the
responsibility for pushing back to the original svn repo.

On the other hand, it would be really nice if the Launchpad 'master'
branch could literally be the svn checkout -- so patches are always
being built against the svn master and anything pushed to the Launchpad
branch it gets automatically pushed to the svn and vice versa.  Is this
possible and if so how?

Thanks & best wishes,

    -- Joe