Idioms of use with bzr-svn -- Bazaar/Launchpad workflow issue

[Russel Winder]

Is there a document anywhere setting out how to deal with the following
situation idiomatically:

The master repository of a project (let's call it SCons) is a Subversion
repository.  A group of people without permission to commit to the SCons
repository are working on a part of the core of SCons.  The team clearly
need to use a DVCS and are forced by Russel to use Bazaar and Launchpad.

To date Russel has been using a private branch of SCons with some
changes that are yet to be merged in to the mainline -- in effect this
is a fork pending the core team dealing with the amendments.  To make
his life simple in terms of knowing where the changes are and how to
create a patch, Russel has been rebasing.   Now though this fork will
have more changes and need sharing between members of the group.
Standard thinking seems to be that rebasing should not be applied to a
public branch.  The problems as I see them are:

--  There are two sets of changes here which really ought to be in
separate feature branches and yet in order to use the fork, all the
changes need to be present in a single branch.  Continually merging from
two feature branches to create a using branch seems excessive overhead.

--  Without rebasing, the changes in the fork compared to the mainline
are no longer sitting prettily above the mainline in the fork.

--  Rebasing means that conflicts between changes in the mainline and
the local amendments are apparent early.  Not rebasing means that you
can get a whole slew of conflicts when trying to make patches -- or a
final rebase as part of the overall merge and death of the "fork"

--  Rebasing causes changes of history and identity of revisions, which
means branches a branch that gets rebased stops idiomatic DVCS usage.

--  SCons core folk tend to Mercurial :-(

The above (or something analogous) strikes me as being an instance of a
common situation.  It therefore should have a standard workflow model.
My first reaction is that I have just failed to find the right place in
the Bazaar documentation . . . 

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at russel.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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