Wondering about processes and functionality with bzr-svn

[Jelmer Vernooij]

Hi Russel,

On Mon, 2010-05-24 at 08:25 +0100, Russel Winder wrote:
> I am not sure if this is a real issue or just me not yet having found
> the right way of doing things . . . 
> 
> The context is working with a project whose master is a Subversion
> repository.  The repository contains the standard trunk/branches/tags
> layout plus some top-level extras such as buildbot and website.
> 
> Git/git-svn and Hg/hgsubversion (*) both allow for cloning and updating
> full repositories mapping Subversion branches to internal branches --
> which means you get to find out when new branches are created.  The
> internal branch approach seems to work well for this, and Git's remote
> tracking branches are great.
> 
> "bzr svn-import" seems to work well as a way of creating and updating a
> Bazaar shared repository -- the incremental nature of the command seems
> to work well.  Except that svn-import is somehow the wrong concept, I am
> no longer importing I am updating.
> 
> I am assuming that I can create local feature branches in this shared
> repository and that future svn-imports will just ignore them.  What
> happens though if I want to commit the branch, does it just all come out
> right?  Also committing to branches known to subversion needs to be
> pushed back to the Subversion repository, is the right way to bind the
> branches, manually push after push from the feature branch, use
> svn-export.
IIRC svn-import will pull --overwrite in branches. It's really meant as
a way to keep a mirror of a remote svn repository.

> I think I am failing to try experiments as I am just unsure of what the
> workflow choices are -- and I cannot afford to damage the Subversion
> repository at the other end!
The issues you're describing are not specific to bzr-svn or Subversion
in any way - the underlying issue is that there are no commands for
dealing with (cloning, pulling, pushing) multiple branches in itself
Bazaar at the same time.

As such, I don't think this is something that should be fixed in bzr-svn
but rather in Bazaar itself. 

Cheers,

Jelmer