Best way to deal with "vendor branch"

[Jonathan Lange]

On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 6:02 AM, Stefan Monnier
<monnier at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>
>  What's the recommended way to deal with a "vendor" branch?
>
>  I use various computers and have things setup as follows:
>
>  - a central location to sync.
>  - each computer does a checkout with binding from that central location.
>  - an external branch http://remote/external/branch.
>
>  Every once in a while I merge from the external branch with "bzr merge".
>  Now here's my problem.
>
>  if my submit_branch is http://remote/external/branch, all works
>  correctly except: I can't do "bzr diff -r submit:" or "bzr diff -r
>  ancestor:" when I'm not connected to the internet.
>
>  The only work around I could find was to create a local mirror of that
>  branch and do:
>
>   (cd ../mirror; bzr pull); bzr merge ../mirror
>
>  which is inconvenient.  Especially because if I later do
>
>   bzr diff -r ancestor:../mirror
>
>  I may not get the right result (in case I did a merge on some other
>  computer, then pushed it to the central location, then pulled it: the
>  latest revision merged from http://remote/external/branch is not
>  guaranteed to already be in ../mirror).
>
>  This doesn't seem like an unusual setup, so how do other people do it?
>
>

Hi Stefan,

Sorry about not responding sooner. I've got to say that I don't quite
understand this set up.

- You have an external branch: http://remote/external/branch.
- You periodically merge this branch into your central location,
bzr://central/branch.
- You work with checkouts bound to bzr://central/branch
- Your issue is that when you are offline, you don't have access to
'remote'. It's not clear from your email whether you have access to
'central' either.
- You want to be able to do 'bzr diff -r submit:' from a checkout,
even when you are offline.

Is this a fair summary of your set-up and issue?

jml