support for colocated branches

This is mostly waiting on a not-completely-technical decision from the bazaar folks -- it's not actually hard.

not entirely sure about importance, setting to wishlist for now

fwiw "bzr git-import" can import these other branches, but there's no way to do so using the Bazaar API.

On Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:46:46 Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> fwiw "bzr git-import" can import these other branches, but there's no
> way to do so using the Bazaar API.

What is missing in the Bazaar API?

On Tue, 2009-06-02 at 03:30 +0000, Tim Penhey wrote:
> On Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:46:46 Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> > fwiw "bzr git-import" can import these other branches, but there's no
> > way to do so using the Bazaar API.
>
> What is missing in the Bazaar API?

The bzr command line has no way to talk about groups of branches; the
underlying API can query and sync multiple branches *one at a time*.

So jelmer may mean 'no efficient way' or 'no way to ask for this from
the command line'.

See the multi-{push,pull} plugins that have been written for examples.

-Rob

There is no way to deal with colocated branches in the Bazaar API at the moment, so it would be impossible for launchpad to open (and pull from) any of the colocated branches of a Git repository URL.

We've discussed colocated branches at the sprint in Strasbourg last week and have agreed on a way forward. I'm going to update the spec for colocated branches in bzr.dev, and hopefully we can work on moving it forward after that.

On 1 February 2010 04:04, Jelmer Vernooij <email address hidden> wrote:
> We've discussed colocated branches at the sprint in Strasbourg last week
> and have agreed on a way forward. I'm going to update the spec for
> colocated branches in bzr.dev, and hopefully we can work on moving it
> forward after that.

For those following this bug: the syntax was agreed so this should now
be unblocked.

--
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>

The bzr-git side of this is now implemented, the main thing remaining is support for colocated branches in URLs in bzrlib.

Any progress on this?

Not much. I didn't get it finished in time before the 2.2 freeze so I've postponed working on it for a bit, as it will probably have to wait until 2.3.

Jelmer, why does the importing of non-master branches require colocated branch support in bzrlib?

We need some way to specify what colocated (because that's effectively what non-master branches are) branch to import in the URL; this is what colocated branches are all about.

This is almost done but I never quite finished it. Now that I'm on Bazaar I've picked it back up again.

I'm tracking this bug now because I'm interested in importing Python's shiny new Mercurial repository at http://hg.python.org/cpython. I've got an import running for the 'default' branch, which will always be the next version of Python 3, but the repo has named branches for all recent released versions of Python.

Once I get imports of all named branches, I'll delete the svn imports, since those have gone read-only.

Being able to address colocated branches in the API and the UI is close to being finished and will fix Philipp's original bug and imports in Launchpad.

Perhaps we should file separate bugs about the further work after this. There are several related issues:

 * the UI surrounding collections of branches - fetching multiple branches at once, cloning multiple branches, etc.
 * formats in Bazaar that support colocated branches

Will there a summary of the API changes somewhere for authors of other foreign VCS plugins, or will we have to inspect the source?

Most of the API changes have actually already landed in bzr 2.3 and consist of extra optional name arguments to ControlDir.open_branch() / ControlDir.create_branch() / ControlDir.destroy_branch().

If you need more information, please let me know.

Jelmer, if you didn't already, could you please add a paragraph or two
to the architecture guide, and perhaps to the 'what's new'?

Martin

On Wed, 2011-03-23 at 01:19 +0000, Martin Pool wrote:
> Jelmer, if you didn't already, could you please add a paragraph or two
> to the architecture guide, and perhaps to the 'what's new'?
Will do, I wasn't actually aware we had an architecture guide. :)

Cheers,

Jelmer

On Wed, 2011-03-23 at 01:19 +0000, Martin Pool wrote:
> Jelmer, if you didn't already, could you please add a paragraph or two
> to the architecture guide, and perhaps to the 'what's new'?
Looks like I did actually write documentation earlier, then forgot I
did. :)

See doc/developers/colocated-branches.txt in bzr.dev.

revno: 3995 [merge]
committer: Canonical.com Patch Queue Manager <email address hidden>
branch nick: +trunk
timestamp: Tue 2009-02-10 04:54:18 +0000
message:
  (Jelmer) Add specification for colocated branches.
------------------------------------------------------------

I've verified it's still current.

Cheers,

Jelmer

way to go.

What is still needed in the Bazaar side?

On Wed, 2011-04-20 at 09:20 +0000, John A Meinel wrote:
> What is still needed in the Bazaar side?
lp:~jelmer/bzr/transport-segments needs to be finished and landed. That's the only thing on the bzr side AFAICT.

Cheers,

Jelmer

It also seems quite important that bzr switch is made aware of colocated branches. But perhaps that is another issue.

Is the linked branch still relevant? There seems to have been some progress on this issue in lp:bzr already?

On Sat, 2011-07-30 at 11:29 +0000, Per Johansson wrote:
> Is the linked branch still relevant? There seems to have been some
> progress on this issue in lp:bzr already?
There has been some progress towards this in lp:bzr, but it is all to
make it possible to merge the attached branch.

Cheers,

Jelmer

There now is a merge proposal that adds the required bits to Bazaar to allow addressing colocated branches in URLs:

bzr log file:///tmp/etckeeper,branch=foo

Rock n' roll.

see https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/2011q3/073372.html for details.

Fixed in stable r13941 <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/stable/revision/13941>.

I still don't see an option to import a custom branch in git import (only option is a "Repo URL") on launchpad web ui (URL e.g. https://code.launchpad.net/gnome-orca/+new-import). Am I missing something? Thanks.

There's no special UI for it yet, but you can import a custom git branch by adding ",branch=somecustombranch" to the end of the URL.