Re: Switching to bzr: what remains to be done?

[Stefan Monnier]

> We've been planning to switch to bzr, but haven't really done so yet.
> What's still blocking this?
> I'll serve as a conduit/organizer in bringing the reasons to bzr
> developers, if necessary.  (It's related to my work anyway.)

I've been using Bzr for my own local branch (on which I do most of my
work, after which I get a diff and move it to CVS to commit it).
Its performance has been acceptable (not mind-blowing, but not
worse than CVS), so I think the main remaining issue to switch is a good
repository to start from.  Jason Earl <address@hidden> has been
working on this but hasn't had yet the expected success.

Part of the problem is that it seems that depending on the tool we use
for the conversion we get some of th desired features, but we can't get
them all, it seems:
- incremental (the repository at
  http://bzr.notengoamigos.org/emacs-merges/trunk/ is incremental and is
  the one I've been using).
- includes merge info between various branches (the above repository
  doesn't include it.  There's another that was based on the Git
  repository, which did have the merge info but could not be updated
  incrementally).
- includes renames.  Apparently none of the conversion tools provide
  that since the info is only available in the Arch repository right
  now, but that has commits that bundle up several CVS commit into one.
- is complete.  The http://bzr.notengoamigos.org/emacs-merges/trunk/
  seems to have some missing elements (IIRC a few CVS tags were
  missing).

Another issue that AFAIK nobody has worked on, is how are we going to
handle the Gnus<->Emacs synchronization in the future.  I expect this to
be doable somehow, maybe by still going through Arch, but of course it
would probably be preferable to do it directly within Bzr, and in any
case it will require for someone to figure it out.

We have lived without any renaming or merge info in our CVS, so these
are not crucial, but since some of that data is available in Arch, it
would really be good if we could somehow bring it over to Bzr.

Also, being able to update the Bzr repository incrementally from
subsequent updates in the CVS is not indispensable, but it would
be helpful to make the transition easier.


        Stefan