[ originally posted Nov 17, 2008 @ 15:18 ]
Note: I’ve since gone back to using Bazaar on my laptop, because I really wanted local committing functionality. Unfortunately it is still awkward to use, particularly with TortoiseBzr for Windows, which sometimes mixes up its commands. My first choice for version control would now be git.
As a Windows-based developer, I was really enthusiastic about using Bazaar (BZR) for version control. At the time my SVN repository was on my home computer, and with being out of the house 13 hours a day there was no scope for making regular commits from my laptop.
Unfortunately, Bazaar’s Windows interface – TortoiseBzr – is still experimental, and DOS doesn’t make it easy to make partial commits because of its awkward copying and pasting functionality.
So even though Subversion is a centralised version control solution, I decided I wanted to go back to it – choosing to have a repository on my laptop.
It would have been simple to just export what I had so far and create a fresh branch in SVN, but I wanted to keep the 96 revisions I already had. Tags – which I began to use for version numbers – would have been useful too.
While there are tools for migrating to bzr from SVN, such as svn2bzr, there’s not much about going the other way. Actually, I had to do a lot of searching to find the tools.
The answer eventually came, in cryptic form, via someone else’s bug report. And for your convenience, here is my explanation, in plain English.
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