bzr-svn still broken in 2.0rc2

[Russel Winder]

Óscar,

On Sat, 2009-09-19 at 01:59 +0200, Óscar Fuentes wrote:
[ . . . ]
>  1. the bzr-svn package on bzr's ppa is restricted to bzr<1.18, so when
>  people upgrade to bzr 1.18 bzr-svn is removed. AFAIK, Synaptic does not
>  show the option of downgrading to bzr 1.17.

Jelmer doesn't deal with PPA issues, he just releases bzr-svn into
Debian.  No-one else picks up bzr-svn releases to put into the Bazaar
PPA as a matter of routine.  It means bzr-svn in the Bazaar PPAs is
systemically never up to date.

I moan about this on a fairly regularly basis.

>  2. even if you install bzr-svn as an ordinary package (bzr branch on
>  the plugins directory etc) it is still buggy, because the real bug is
>  in the subvertpy package. So you have to manually install subvertpy,
>  which is not as easy as installing the bzr-svn plugin, because it is a
>  C python extension. This introduces a problem of a mixed ppa + manual
>  installation, which is harder to maintain.

Which bug are you thinking of here?  I run bzr.dev and bzr-svn from
lp:bzr, but I do not install a special subvertpy, I just take the one
offered by aptitude, which seems to be 0.6.7:

        |> apt-cache policy python-subvertpy
        python-subvertpy:
          Installed: 0.6.7-1~ppa1~jaunty1
          Candidate: 0.6.7-1~ppa1~jaunty1
          Version table:
         *** 0.6.7-1~ppa1~jaunty1 0
                500 http://dimen.russel.org.uk jaunty/main Packages
                100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
             0.6.1-1ubuntu1 0
                500 http://dimen.russel.org.uk jaunty/universe Packages
        
Except for Dulwich where it seems there is no choice, I generally refuse
to install any software using disttools.  If it doesn't come via
aptitude (*) or is installed on a per person basis in their own
filestore, it doesn't get installed.  As you say, too much maintenance
otherwise.

(*) pkg-get on Solaris, and port on Mac OS X.

>  3. on Windows the situation is that the installer comes with everything
>  on a single package, but containing an outdated bzr-svn (0.6.5). Jelmer
>  is on 1.0.1 and before that the last on the 0.6 series was 0.6.9. And
>  it comes with the buggy subvertpy too.
> 
> Please let me know if you need more info.

Personally I think bzr-svn is far too important to the future of Bazaar
not to be treated as core to Bazaar.  It is fine that it is a plugin,
but it should have similar status to bzrtools in the development cycle
of Bazaar.  No matter what the cycle of development and release of bzr,
bzrtools and bzr-svn, there is always a consistent release in Debian,
Ubuntu, MacPorts, Fink, and any other packaging repository, and
especially the Bazaar release PPA.  I guess Windows and Mac OS X
installers fall in the same category.

bzr-svn is the single biggest USP that bzr has over Git and Mercurial,
it's priority needs to be raised to harness this potential.
-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      Partner
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