Feedback on merging via bzr

[Michael Bienia]

On 2010-01-17 22:45:53 -0500, Scott Kitterman wrote:

Currently I often insert a step 0 before starting on merging with bzr:
- Check if the Debian branch is uptodate.

Perhaps I got unlucky when picking a package to merge but several of the
packages I wanted to merge had outdated Debian branches so I had to do
it by hand (download the Debian .dsc and the Ubuntu delta from PTS and
merge it).

> Step 1: Getting the source:
> 
> Using MoM, I would have grab-merge.sh regina-normal and then had local copies 
> of the common ancestor package, the current Debian package, the current Ubuntu 
> package, and a proposed merge with any conflicting files listed.
> 
> The UDD equivalent seems to be:
> 
> $bzr branch lp:ubuntu/regina-normal regina-normal
> $password for ssh key
> $cd regina-normal
> $bzr merge-package lp:debian/squeeze/regina-normal

I usually do a "bzr init-repo" before and branch both the Ubuntu and
Debian branch and use the local Debian branch for merging and diffing.

It would be really nice if bzr warned one if the format of local branch
and the remote repository differ *before* I start working on something.

I merged "fuse" the usual way (and used "bzr init-repo" for storing the
branches) and when I was about to push the branch towards my LP account
for sponsoring, I got told that bzr can't push it because the LP branch
uses a different format.
I branched the Ubuntu branch once again (this time without "bzr
init-repo" so it keeps its format) and kind of redid the merge (I copied
the changed files from the other branch into this one). This time the
pushing worked. But it cost me unnecessary time.

Michael