Each time when I have to use Bazaar I feel sick. It takes hours to do things which should not take more then few minutes. Let’s start with today problem and compare it to git.
I finally got armel-cross-toolchain-base to build with non-sysrooted binutils. It required adding one patch and building binutils twice (once with sysroot for use during build, second without to put it in Ubuntu archive). After whole work I had 2 files to add, 3 hunks of changes in debian/rules and that’s all.
So I used “bzr add” on new files and “bzr commit -i” to select which hunks goes into which commit and repeated it until all changes landed in local branch. But then I discovered that I forgot to add 1.51 version into debian/changelog file before whole that work. So I did it now and next commit added 1.52 version.
And this is when whole “fun” started… I wanted to move r131 (the one with 1.51 changelog entry) to be before r128 one. With git it is just a matter or “git rebase -i” and whole work is done. But this was bzr…
“bzr rebase” command (part of “bzr-rewrite” package) supports only rebasing on top of other branch. But it was also useful as my branch was a bit out of sync with upstream one. So I started to ask questions on #linaro channel as Zygmunt was there and his knowledge of Bazaar was a big help in past. There were few ideas and I did some reading in meanwhile.
One solution was “use pipelines” and you know? They even works but then I needed to cherry pick one commit (r131 one). The only way which I found was “bzr merge -r130..131 :first” and I got all changes but not changeset. Right, git users, you have to commit after merge (and use “bzr log” to find commit message). And when you try “bzr merge” for few revisions they will be squashed… So finally what I did was merging changeset by changeset and commiting with original commit messages. Good that it was just few of them.
So after more then 10 minutes (“git rebase -i”) I finally got branch ready to be pushed. Next time I will spend that time on checking what is wrong with git-bzr-ng plugin as this will give me working two-way handling of Bazaar repositories without touching “bzr” command.