Migrating multiple Mercurial branches to Bazaar

[Gustavo Narea]

Hello,

We have a mainline development branch in Mercurial and a couple of
sub-branches which will get merged into the main one at some point, but
not just yet. We're trying to migrate to Bazaar but it doesn't seem to
be easy because of these sub-branches.

I managed to convert the main branch and a sub-branch into Bazaar
branches with no problem at all, but when I tried to merge the
sub-branch into the main one, I got this:
"bzr: ERROR: Branches have no common ancestor, and no merge base
revision was specified."

Ideally, we'd migrate all the branches to Bazaar in one go, forget about
Mercurial and let Bazaar handle future merges into the mainline
development branch. Would this be possible? If not, is there another
solution?

I also thought about mirroring the main branch in Bazaar, so that new
branches can be created in Bazaar and the existing HG branches will be
merged in the HG branch when they're ready; this way, we'll get rid of
the main Mercurial branch when all the sub-branches have been merged.
The problem is, it's likely that some of the Bazaar branches would need
to be merged into the main Mercurial branch. This is the only solution I
can think of, though.

We cannot wait until all the sub-branches have been merged and thus
there's only one branch to migrate, because we are several developers
working on different projects at the same time, so that cannot happen.

This is a relatively big repository (~10,000 files and about 9,000
revisions), so starting with a fresh/empty Bazaar branch is not an
option because we really have to keep all the previous revisions. On the
other hand, we really need to switch to Bazaar because Mercurial handles
file renaming poorly and that is leading to a countless amount of
conflicts while trying to merge a branch where many files were
renamed/moved.

Thanks in advance.

-- 
Gustavo Narea.
Software Developer.
2degrees, Ltd. <http://www.2degreesnetwork.com/>.