bzr - how to switch to Emacs 23 branch?

bzr - how to switch to Emacs 23 branch?

[David Reitter]

It would be great if http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BzrForEmacsDevs could explain how one gets to another branch - I have something that I believe to be a Bzr repository, with the "trunk" inside it, which I created according to that page.  

But how do I also create emacs/emacs-23 from that?  The data is surely there, but "bzr branches" only lists "trunk" (after several seconds wait).  I surely won't have to pull the branch from scratch from the server (presumably a very long operation)...?

So, I'd like equivalent to "git branch" (to list the branches) and "git checkout emacs-23".
(Sorry, this seems to be really a beginner's question, and I feel duly stupid, but I checked the above docs and also Canonical's "Bazaar for git users" page...)

Thanks
- David

Re: bzr - how to switch to Emacs 23 branch?

[Óscar Fuentes]

David Reitter <david.reitter@gmail.com> writes:

> It would be great if http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BzrForEmacsDevs
> could explain how one gets to another branch - I have something that I
> believe to be a Bzr repository, with the "trunk" inside it, which I
> created according to that page.
>
> But how do I also create emacs/emacs-23 from that?

On the same directory where your `trunk' branch lives:

bzr branch sftp://USERNAME@bzr.savannah.gnu.org/srv/bzr/emacs/emacs-23 emacs-23

or, if you don't have commit access

bzr branch http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/r/emacs/emacs-23 emacs-23

> The data is surely there, but "bzr branches" only lists "trunk" (after
> several seconds wait).

"bzr branches" doesn't work very well. As the wiki page says (on the
section "Where is Emacs?") use your web browser to see the available
branches.

> I surely won't have to pull the branch from scratch from the server
> (presumably a very long operation)...?

No, if you are using a shared repo, as the wiki page says.

> So, I'd like equivalent to "git branch" (to list the branches) and
> "git checkout emacs-23".

Bad news: bzr is not git. You need to retrain your dVCS-fu to work with
bzr. Practising some yoga will help too.

[snip]

Re: bzr - how to switch to Emacs 23 branch?

[David Reitter]

On Sep 11, 2010, at 9:37 PM, Óscar Fuentes wrote:
> 
> bzr branch sftp://USERNAME@bzr.savannah.gnu.org/srv/bzr/emacs/emacs-23 emacs-23

Thanks, this worked.  I thought it had the reference for the branch locally. 
It still took a few minutes to complete, though!

> Bad news: bzr is not git. You need to retrain your dVCS-fu to work with
> bzr. Practising some yoga will help too.

I agree.  The whole pull-does-not-merge, and merge-does-not-commit thing is of course a bit confusing for a Gitster.  (These aren't bad features I think - they are just different.)

After my change (done on the branch directly), I had to merge/commit from the remote before I could push.  This created an extra merge commit, and I thought that that wouldn't be clean.  So I "uncommitted" everything to the state before my change, merged/committed, and then applied my change again.  Is this the right way? is there an easier way?  Or do all these spurious merges not matter in terms of public history?