fast-import should not override the current branch (or should warn before doing it)

[Gioele Barabucci]

I accidentally run bzr fast-import in a directory that is part of a branch. bzr fast-import overwrote the .bzr directory with the new content and asked to run "bzr update" to adjust the working tree.

fast-import should not overwrite existing .bzr files. It should refuse to run when launched from a bzr-managed directory, or, at least, it should inform the user that it is about to overwrite the .bzr directory of the current branch.

[Ian Clatworthy (ian-clatworthy)]

When restarting an import or doing an 'incremental' import, we actually want to extend the current branch though.

I'm pretty sure fast-import wouldn't have succeeded if the branch wasn't compatible with the import stream. Was that your experience?

Also, you should be able to recover quite easily using:

  bzr uncommit -rxxxx
  bzr revert

[Gioele Barabucci (gioele)]

In fact the branch was compatible. Nevertheless I didn't want to overwrite.

May I suggest to add a warning along the lines of "You're about to overwrite the existing branch/repository '/path/FOO'. This is normal if you are doing an incremental import. Are you sure you want to continue?"

uncommit and revert would have not helped me: I interrupted bzr update with ^C (after seeing hundreds of "removing foo") so the branch (actually a standalone branch) was not in an usable state; at least it was not evident to me how to get back. The situation was aggravated by the presence of many unversioned (ignored) big files I was afraid to lose. For the records, I got out of this problem moving the dir away, making a branch from the push location and merging the unversioned files back into the new checkout with pax. With a little warning in place I would have probably avoided all these problems.

[Neil Martinsen-Burrell (nmb)]

This bit me recently. I was able to recover with the following process (motivated by the warning message that ``bzr uncommit`` gives when it rolls back a commit.

1. Find the revision-id of the last revision in your original branch. If you have an unaffected version of the same branch, then you can use ``bzr log --show-ids -r -1``. If not, you need to poke around in the index files to see the revisions that live in the repository. For me, that looked like:

$ bzr dump-btree .bzr/repository/indices/<some obscure pack name>.rix

Look for a sequence of revisions that all happened within seconds of one another. These are from fast-import. The revision before these is the one you want. It's revision-id is in the FIRST tuple. The later revision-ids are its parents.

2. Do ``bzr pull . -r revid:<the revision id from step 1>``. This should give you many, many conflicts, but you can check to make sure that this is the revision you want. Then re-do the pull with the ``--overwrite`` option to get back to where you started. You can also pull this revision into a new branch.

[Matt Chapman (matt-ninjitsuweb)]

I'm years late to the party, but I was just trying to import some files & history from a git repo into an existing bzr repo. Instead of incrementally adding the desired files and history, fast-import appears to have completely replaced the existing history. `bzr status` shows all the original files as unknown now, and `bzr log` shows only the history of the imported files, nothing prior. I received no warning that this would happen. It seems my only choice is to re-branch from the remote origin and start over. :-(