1. dequis.org
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  3. git bzr workflow

I maintain a git fork of bitlbee, which I use since bzr sucks. But submitting stuff upstream requires creating bzr branches.

There is an ongoing, very slow, and not particularly aggressive effort to get rid of that 'requirement' - here's my weird-ass workaround, meanwhile.

I've been keeping my git/bzr workflow notes in the bitlbee-dx readme, but they don't really belong there. Also, the commit history is already quite messy, I'd rather not make it worse with a bunch of README changes.

WIP - just copied the readme directly from the repo for now, needs some updating

Branches

  • master: follows upstream (was using upstream for this before)
  • develop: main bitlbee-dx branch.
  • patch/*: small patches and bugfixes (may be stolen from trac)
  • feat/*: non-trivial features
  • <username>/*: git mirrored branches of other people (like flexo/python)
  • wip/*: incomplete stuff.

Workflow

This is a fork in the sense of a standalone project, but i'm also intending to merge as much as possible upstream. Unfortunately upstream uses bzr, and bzr is awful. Thanks to git-remote-bzr, most of this pain is avoided, but I've had to do some compromises to keep this workflow.

Simple stuff first: features belong in feature branches, pull requests are used for the review process. Travis-ci integration is enabled, but the test suite isn't extremely comprehensive.

The develop branch diverges from master. Use git cherry -v master to compare them. Commits that are in both branches are prefixed with a - (even if they have different commit objects), while commits unique to develop are prefixed with +

Upstream submission:

git checkout -b branch-for-upstream master

# cherry pick relevant commits, or fast-forward feature branches
git cherry-pick CAFEBABE

# TODO: figure out how to create a new remote bzr branch. i always forget

# let git-remote-bzr know this branch exists
git config remote.bzr-dequis.bzr-branches "upstream, branch-for-upstream"

# push to bzr.dequis.org
git push bzr-dequis branch-for-upstream

A fast forward is required so that bzr pull works, otherwise bzr merge should be run, which generates a fat merge commit hiding all the commits in a sub-timeline. Weird stuff.

Merging back from upstream:

git fetch bzr-bitlbee
git checkout master
git merge bzr-bitlbee/master   # fast-forward

Then the commits from master are rebased to develop.

git checkout -b master-rebase
git rebase develop
git checkout develop
git merge master-rebase        # fast-forward
git branch -d master-rebase

And this is why i say they diverge - all the commit objects are different. I reserve the right of rebasing develop to clean up this mess to match upstream at some point.

To handle .bzrignore as .gitignore in the bzr-only branches (which don't have git specific stuff since they need to be sync'd perfectly with upstream)

git config core.excludesfile .bzrignore