Merging with Bazaar

[James Westby]

On Fri Nov 06 06:41:54 +0000 2009 Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> Thank you very much on your work on this.
> 
> I just want to add that in my experience, it is more convinient and
> practical to merge the other way round:
> 
> $ bzr get lp:debian/<series>/<package> lucid ; cd lucid
> $ bzr merge-package lp:debian/<package>
> 
> In some package, I got significant less conflicts. The other reason is
> that 'bzr revert <file>' will revert the file to the version in debian,
> not in ubuntu. In most cases this is what I want, as the general rule is
> to reduce the interdiff to debian.

This gets the parents the wrong way round though, so I do not advise it.

For the revert issue, you can use "bzr revert -rbranch:lp:debian/<series>/<package>"

I'm not sure why that's your experience with conflicts, if you give me
a package that you saw this with then I can investigate.

> At the end of the process, just before committing the merge, a 'bzr
> diff' will show the diff to the debian package. The fact that you can
> limit this diffs to files and subdirectories makes it much easier to
> decide which parts of the diff can and should be upstreamed to debian.

Note that this is still possible with the merge the "correct" way round.

  bzr diff --old lp:debian/<series>/<package>

This is the sort of thing that we should automate more to save typing.

Thanks,

James