Getting started with bzr-svn (was Re: bzr-svn and subversion revisions)

[Matt Doran]

John Szakmeister wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 4:03 AM, Russel
> Winder<russel.winder at concertant.com> wrote:
> [snip]
>   
>>> I'm a bit hesitant to start using bzr as an svn client for our company
>>> svn repo, without a bit more documentation to guide me.   And I have
>>> less time than I'd like to stumble through it myself.
>>>       
>> The problem here is that in reality there is no special documentation.
>> the whole point of bzr-svn is that it makes a Subversion repository look
>> like a Bazaar branch.  You just use Bazaar commands as (well) documented
>> across the website.  Unlike Git which has special commands, Bazaar has
>> no special commands for dealing with Subversion.
>>     
>
> That is the beauty of the bzr-svn plugin (which I *love*).
> Unfortunately, there isn't a complete mapping of Subversion into
> Bazaar.  For instance, if I introduce files on my Bazaar branch, I
> can't set file properties (svn:eol-style, svn:mime-type, etc).  You
> also need to be careful about pushing into the mainline.  bzr-svn's
> push behavior can be rather unfriendly if you aren't rebasing your
> branch before pushing.  For instance, we like to review commits to our
> SVN repo.  But the commit reordering that Bazaar and bzr-svn does,
> makes that difficult, and it's frightening for svn users to see
> "Copied /trunk r123".  Also, the commit reordering makes it harder to
> cherry pick revisions in SVN, because the commit re-ordering changes
> when a particular rev was introduced on trunk versus when we branched
> our stable line.  We ran into that a couple times when I was not so
> careful.
>
> I would also like to see so beefier documentation, and I'd be willing
> to contribute to that.  I, personally, haven't explored everything
> with bzr-svn yet (I have done an import, haven't tried tagging
> branches, or teaching bzr-svn about some of our more awkward
> repository layouts).  But I have been using it nearly everyday for 9
> months.
Thanks a lot for your thoughts.    I guess I should just give it a try 
and see. :)

It's the stuff the John mentions above that makes me a little nervous.  
I don't know what bzr-svn will commit to the SVN repository.  e.g. is it 
a single commit representing all my changes, or does it do more 
fine-grained commits (which John seems to be implying above)?

And how does bzr-svn handle svn branches?   Does it understand the 
trunk/branches/tags structure?  Do I just do an bzr branch from trunk, 
and bzr-svn will figure out the rest?

I'm sure I'd come to understand this with experimentation.  But I'm 
hesitant to do this testing/experimentation on our main svn repo.  I'd 
probably need to setup a test sandbox so I can see how things work.  And 
then when I'm comfortable, use it for real-world work.

I'd expect many others to have these same hestitations.    It's a 
barrier to bzr-svn adoption.

Cheers,
Matt

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