Question

I have a bazaar repository on a shared server. I’d like to clean up the repo and set it up from scratch but maintain my history. I don’t know how the repository was created initially (is there a way to find out?).

• Can I take a branch and make that into my main shared repo?

Is this a viable process:

bzr init-repo --no-trees /home/bzr/myrepository
cd /home/bzr/myrepository
bzr init stable
cp /home/oldbzr/branch_taken_from_current_repo/* ./stable/
cp /home/oldbzr/branch_taken_from_current_repo/.bzr ./stable/ 

Thanks

Answer 1

A “branch” and a “repo” in Bazaar are totally separate concepts. You don’t convert a branch into a repo. What you usually think of as a repo (in SVN or Git, for example) is actually a branch in Bazaar. What you want to do is create a new repo, then copy the old branch into the new repo.

You almost have it right, but you don’t want to use “cp”, you want to use “bzr branch”. Note: You can usually use “cp” to copy branches except when you want Bazaar to move a branch into, out of, or across a repository — then you need “bzr branch” to intelligently repack the history. So here is what you want to do:

bzr init-repo --no-trees /home/bzr/myrepository
cd /home/bzr/myrepository
bzr branch /home/oldbzr/branch_taken_from_current_repo stable

Note that I am not doing “bzr init” — I don’t want to create a new branch, just copy the old one. And I am not manually copying the old branch or its .bzr directory. If you copy the old branch’s .bzr, it will not end up using the new repository. By doing a “bzr branch” it will go “oh hey, I am moving into a repository. Therefore, I will put all of my commit data into the shared repository, and just put a lightweight branch in ‘stable’.”