Merging with Bazaar

[Reinhard Tartler]

James Westby <jw+debian at jameswestby.net> writes:

> 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.

What is the correct order for parents? Why does it matter here and what
are the practical consequences in this scenario?

Aren't the branches thrown away after the merge anyway?

(I don't want to be pendantic, I just want to understand why the
ordering of the parents is important here)

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

Which is more cumbersome to type at the command line and imposes
latencies due to network access. Nothing serious, I agree.

> 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.

I will report it to you when I encounter this again.

>> 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>

Oh, that switch is news to me. Thanks for pointing it out!

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

Absolutely!

-- 
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4