Bazaar and bug trackers

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

PRINGLE Chris writes:

 > How do I update an already committed changeset to say which bugs it
 > fixes?

Strictly speaking, you cannot.

Currently Bazaar, like all other DVCSes, uses the commit message in
determining the identity of the commit.  Change that, and you have
effectively created a branch.  Any existing commits that depend on the
original commit will also have to be rebased onto the new branch,
changing their identities as well.

The feature of changing the log message without changing commit
identity is under discussion already, but I don't know if any progress
has been made.  git has an annotation feature where (a sufficiently
recent version of) git looks for an annotation and displays it as part
of the log message.  If that looks good to you, you might want to
lobby for adding a similar feature to Bazaar (check the issue tracker
first, of course, it probably is already there).

A poor man's version of this feature would use a tags with some
conventional name.  Tags are automatically displayed in the log
messages according to bzr help, but this would probably seriously
pollute the visual space of graphical history browsers.  YMMV.

 > If a developer forgets to put the --fixes option on the
 > commit, how do you retrospectively mark which bugs a changeset
 > fixes? Following on from that, how can I change the bug number (if
 > a developer puts the wrong bug number in by mistake)?

As above, you can't "mark" the commit, except by a convention
involving tags.  This would allow you to delete an erroneous
"fixed-NNNN" tag and replace it with "fixed-MMMM".