bzr-fastimport progress update

[Ian Clatworthy]

The short version ...

The bzr-fastimport plugin is much better now I believe and well worth
end-user testing. I'm certainly keen for importing to be reliable and as
painless as possible. However, I really need to get back onto some other
things. I therefore need user feedback ASAP please on how well trunk is
working or otherwise, so I can prioritise remaining import problems
along with everything else on my plate: content filtering fixes, getting
explorer 0.7 out and into karmic, documentation rebuilds, following up
Windows/OS-X packaging, etc.

The long version ...

After several days of intense hacking, I think bzr-fastimport is now
looking a fair bit better. In particular, the number of tests has
increased from 170+ to 330+ so I'm hopeful that many more projects will
be able to migrate to Bazaar using it. If anyone is able to test it on a
data migration, that would be *really* helpful. If you find bugs, please
report them ASAP.

I'm like some *quick* feedback please on whether the trunk is now good
enough to call 0.9. The time for getting this into karmic is almost up!
If I do release 0.9 in the next 24 hours, can someone volunteer to
package it? (Jelmer has in the past but I believe he's still on vacation.)

For those looking to round-trip bzr branches, this version is still not
cooked enough for that to work on 99% of datasets. It *may* work for
you, it may not. YMMV because ...

There are still zero tests for bzr fast-export. :-( I'm still not happy
that it's doing the right thing often enough either. While getting
importing reliable is a higher priority for me than exporting, I'd like
to validate imports by "round-tripping" and I'm still unable to do that
on complex datasets. For example, trying:

  bzr fast-export bzr.dev bzr.fi
  bzr fast-import bzr.fi bzr.imported

doesn't work yet because fast-export is producing a stream for a few
complex commits that probably doesn't make sense. Damn. So the import
falls over but I suspect most of the bugs are on the export side.

I've started working on a better exporter tonight if anyone wants to try
it out and/or help: lp:~ian-clatworthy/bzr-fastimport/export-fixes. I'm
yet to try it on bzr.dev so it may be better already but I suspect it
has a way to go still. I'm not expecting this to make 0.9 but it's a
start to addressing the numerous bugs on the export side ...

Ian C.