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

[Russel Winder]

On Sat, 2010-05-22 at 16:57 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Why do you think that's excessive?  If they're separate feature
> branches, then they should not conflict very much.  Most merges should
> work without conflict.  The using branch will eventually be thrown
> away, so you can just keep merging to it from each feature branch
> without worrying about whether its history makes any sense.

OK, I have set up an experiment to see if it is workable.

I like having script based update of my collection of branches and
repositories (Bazaar, Mercurial and Git).  To date I am finding it a lot
easier to do this with Mercurial and Git than with Bazaar -- because of
the internal vs. standalone branch architectures.   Basically I have to
have a script in each shared repository describing the structure and
allowing automated update.  The question is whether I am just missing a
feature of bazaar I should know about or whether this is a missing
feature.

Is there an "update shared repository" command in Bazaar?

> Mercurial (git) people often use mq (stgit) in this kind of situation,
> but that tends to lose the history of the branch, or require that you
> use a patch per proposed commit in the branch.  bzr pipelines are a
> bit better than mq in terms of keeping history, but I'm not sure how
> well they work with multiple pipelines cooperating.  bzr looms may be
> exactly what you are looking for, but I haven't used either pipelines
> or looms in anger, only in toy examples where the extra commands were
> literally more trouble than they could possibly save.

I guess I should find out properly about pipelines and looms but at
first impression they seem complicated.

Also the idea that a product is a series of patches seems to be what
Mercurial does best.

I guess my problem is I have never used quilt, so don't have the
background.

Google on seems to have
http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/Documentation/LoomAsSmarterQuilt and
http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/plugins/en/loom-plugin.html as
documentation, is there more anywhere on looms.  For pipelines it seems:
http://wiki.bazaar-vcs.org/BzrPipeline and
http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/plugins/en/pipeline-plugin.html.

> You can merge progress in the mainline into each feature branch
> separately.  bzr will in general be smart enough to avoid conflicts
> when merging the feature branches into a testing branch.  This isn't
> as pretty as rebasing, but (with current technology) you can't rebase
> public branches anyway.

I guess my main irritant is keeping the patch that needs applying to the
mainline up to date.  Subversion encourages non-committers to contribute
by providing patches on an issue tracker.  By the time the committers
get round to doing anything the patch is way out of date.  Which means
you end up having to continually update the patch on the issue tracker.

I guess there is a need for something that allows Subversion-oriented
committers to be able to handle merge requests from
Bazaar-as-Subversion-client people.

-- 
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
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/attachments/20100524/7deff255/attachment.pgp