On Mon, 2010-11-08 at 20:39 +0000, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Jelmer Vernooij <email address hidden>:
> > It also looks like you're running on Lucid rather than maverick? Or
> > perhaps the error is referring to an old record?
> You know, I'm actually not sure how to tell.  I upgrade rhe machine
> incrementally; it's not giving me the notification that a system
> upgrade is waiting, which caused me to believe I was up to Maverick
> level.  How would you check.
It's usually easiest to look in /etc/apt/sources.list and see what the
latest distroseries is specified there (jaunty, karmic, lucid,
maverick). 

> > I'm sorry, it looks like you picked the worst moment to try out
> > bzr-fastimport as I split python-fastimport out of bzr-fastimport (by
> > far the largest change in over a year) yesterday evening. This, like the
> > other issue you ran into, is unexpected fallout of that. I did some
> > fairly extensive testing of bzr fastimport before doing this split but I
> > still seem to've missed a few things and apparently uncovered some blind
> > spots in our testsuite.
> Been there myself, and probably will be again; naive-user tests do have a way 
> of catching one with one's pants down. So I won't rant at you or anything. But
> this leaves two issues:
:-) 

> 1. The bzr help-import documentation neve anywhere I can see, explains
> that the "source" argument is a branch name or what the namespaces and
> semantics of branch names are.  This is a documentation bug that needs
> to be fixed.
Agreed; I've filed a bug report about this. 

> 2. What's a branch name?  Why do I care?  Does it select only part of the 
> repository? If so, why can't I leave it out and get all branches exported?
> Is there some magic cookie I can put there that means "give me all branches"?
All branches in bzr have an explicit path in the file system, the
repository is merely the place where the revisions happen to be stored,
unlike e.g. git where it also acts as more of a mechanism to group
related branches.

There is no way to export multiple branches at the moment.

> > >  * *commit-properties* - custom metadata per commit that Bazaar stores
> > >    in revision properties (e.g. branch-nick and bugs fixed by this
> > >    change) will be included in the output.
> > > If commit-properties are now officially part of the format, that's 
> > > one of my feature requests down - but I can't find any indication of
> > > this in the git docs.  What's the actual state of play?
> > This is a bzr extension. I think bzr will emit it using the new
> > "feature" extension that should be documented in the git docs. I'm not
> > sure how official the commit-properties field is. 
> 
> What's its syntax?  Is it documented somewhere?  I need to know enough to
> parse it.
I'm not sure if it's documented anywhere. I suspect it is, but that I
simply just don't know where. As far as I can tell from the
python-fastimport sourcecode the format is something like this:

"property" <space> NAME <space> VALUE-LENGTH <space> VALUE

or, if the value is empty:

"property" <space> NAME

NAME and VALUE are utf8-encoded.

The properties for each commit are sorted by the property name.

Cheers,

Jelmer