Bazaar

When outlining the use of team branches on Launchpad previously, I used the --create-prefix option when pushing the branch to sftp://bazaar.launchpad.net. This was to make sure the initial push would succeed, even if the /~username/product directory the branch would be created in didn't exist. To simplify things for users, we made a change to the SFTP server in the latest release, so that --create-prefix is no longer necessary. This does not affect the allowed branch directories though: the structure is used to associate the branches with products, and decide who can write to the branches. Another change included in the rollout is the ability to rename branches and reassign them to different owners through the web interface. So for instance, you can give ownership of a personal branch to a team your project grows to multiple developers. This should be used sparingly, since it will change the published branch URLs which can confuse people using your branch.

Earlier, David Allouche described how to host Bazaar branches on Launchpad. At the end, he alluded to the ability to create branches that can be committed to by anyone on a team. I'll describe how this works here. Launchpad Teams Launchpad allows people to organise themseleves into teams. Most of the things people can do in Launchpad can also be done by teams, including owning branches. You can create a new team at the following page: https://launchpad.net/people/+newteam There are three different membership policies you can choose from: Open: anyone can join. Choosing this sort of team effectively gives everyone write access to branches owned by the team. Moderated: new memberships must be approved by one of the administrators (this is the default policy). This makes it easy for people to request commit access to the branch while still requiring approval from a team administrator.. Restricted: new members can only be added by the team administrators. This is appropriate if new members shouldn't be able to propose themselves normally. Once the team has been created, members of the team can create the branches. Uploading a Team Owned Branch Now that you are a member of a team, you can upload branches to that team's directory on bazaar.launchpad.net. This is done in the same way as uploading personal branches described in David's article: cd branchdir bzr push --create-prefix sftp://bazaar.launchpad.net/~teamname/product/branchname When the command completes, the team owned branch will have been created. Now you can treat this branch like a personal branch, but once someone else pushes a commit to the branch, "bzr push" will tell you that the branch has diverged, and not let you push your changes until you merge them to your branch. An alternative model is to use checkouts, which provide a workflow closer to CVS and Subversion without losing Bazaar's ability to work while disconnected. Bazaar Checkouts A Bazaar checkout is a local working copy bound to a remote branch such that changes are committed to the remote location. The remote branch data is also cached locally to speed up local operations and allow you to work while disconnected from the network. A checkout of the previously created team branch can be created with the following command: bzr checkout sftp://bazaar.launchpad.net/~teamname/product/branchname team-branch cd team-branch Alternatively if you still have the local branch used to create the team branch, it can be converted to a checkout with the "bzr bind" command: cd branchdir bzr bind sftp://bazaar.launchpad.net/~teamname/product/branchname You can then make commits to the checkout as you would with any other branch, provided the checkout is up to date with the remote branch. If another team member has committed to the branch in the mean time though, you will be prompted to update your checkout to the head of the latest version of the remote branch. If this happens, the checkout can be updated by issuing the "bzr update" command. You can then retry the commit, after fixing any conflicts that are reported. Disconnected Operation with Checkouts If you are disconnected…

Have you wanted to play around with bzr but had nowhere to share your branches? You can now publish them through Launchpad. David Allouche provides the details. In short, you can upload branches to sftp://bazaar.launchpad.net/, and they will be published on http://bazaar.launchpad.net/.