Repository problems after bzr svn-import, ghost revisions

[Anteru]

Hi,

we've recently switched from SVN to Bzr, but unfortunately, we're running 
into some (possibly serious) issues now. We had a SVN repository, and one 
developer used Bzr locally -- unfortunately, he also did some local merges. 
As this was working fine, we eventually decided to fully migrate the Bzr.

For this, we did a _fresh_ bzr svn-import and _deleted_ the local bzr 
branches (and no, we can't recover those, and yes, I see now that this is 
going to be a problem ...) The svn-import worked fine, and we branched off 
from this to all machines. Side note: On the first import, we got like 200 
inconsistent parents, but bzr reconcile was able to fix this.

The problem we're facing now is that we have 20 ghost revisions in the 
repository (due to the merges), which break diff for us. The merges 
typically merged only one revision (except for 1 or 2 merges which merged 
2.) Ideally, we'd like to change a merge to be a single, simple commit, that 
is, instead of the current mess. I just run a bzr check -v, which lists the 
ids of the ghost revisions, and indeed, they are all pointing at such 
merges.

I just spent some time in the IRC to describe the problem, and I was told 
that with some repository surgery (deleting them from the parent list), it 
should be possible to get a properly working repository again. Worst of all, 
we did some development _afterwards_ which added new revisions to the 
repository, which we don't want to get lost.

I'm open for any suggestions and also willing to invest a lot of time if 
necessary to fix the repository. Hopefully this post can also help other 
people to avoid this kind of issues :)

Cheers,
  Anteru