Cannot have Launchpad publish hosted bzr branches to external git repositories

[Aurélien Gâteau]

Launchpad has the ability to mirror the master branch of a git repository which is nice to do work with upstream projects while keeping all our work in the same place. We miss however the ability to push a branch back to a git repository, making it easier for upstream developers to review and include our changes in their project.

[Peter Bex (peter-bex)]

That would rock. I would definitely use this!

One note though: I don't think pushing would make sense; It'd make more sense to make the bzr branch available (read-only would be fine) through the git protocol.

[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

You can already push to a git repository using bzr-git, which is what Launchpad uses for mirroring.

[Peter Bex (peter-bex)]

I disagree this is invalid; the more common use-case of offering a repo containing modifications so that upstream can pull (or cherry-pick) from it is more useful than pushing to git repos. And AFAIK that's impossible now.

[Peter Bex (peter-bex)]

In other words: project X is using git, I prefer bzr, so I branch off from a bzr import of that git repo.

I make some nice modifications which I would like to see taken up by project X mainline, so I submit a pull request. They review my changes and merge my stuff into their code, using git (I can't/don't want to force them to use bzr).

[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

The problem is that you haven't described why Launchpad should be involved in your pull request at all. We don't host git repositories, so you'll need to push the branch somewhere else in order to submit a pull request. It's easier to use bzr-git to do this than it is to push to Launchpad, and then request Launchpad to push to some other site. Since the other site would require credentials, you'd also need to provide Launchpad with your login/password to the other site, or at least set up an OAuth token on that other site that allowed Launchpad to push for you.

[Peter Bex (peter-bex)]

Note that I didn't say Launchpad should _push_ to the remote server! I was talking about a PULL request. The other side would pull from a (possibly readonly) git interface to my bzr branch.

My use case is that a project I work on is using Git, but I prefer Bzr.

So I set up a Bzr mirror of a git repo on Launchpad. I hack on the code for a bit and then need a place publish my changed code (which is still a bzr repository): I put it on Launchpad.

But the project I branched from doesn't use bzr, they use Git. They need a way to fetch my changes.

Note that there's no git involved anywhere except for the initial conversion to bzr and integrating the changes back into that repository. Currently git->bzr is one-way only; you can import a git repository into bzr but you can't contribute your modifications back into that git repository unless you either a) get commit access and use bzr-git to _push_ the changes or b) find some other place to host a git repo and push your bzr repo with bzr-git. I'd prefer to keep everything in one place (Launchpad).

[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

The original author of this bug talked about pushing, not providing bzr branches in git format, so that's what this bug is about.

Perhaps you should file a new bug about providing bzr branches in git format. However, that would be a major policy change.

[Aurélien Gâteau (agateau)]

I talked about pushing, but what Peter propose is much nicer because it does not require me to create a separate git repository. I agree with Aaron that pushing to a git repository can be done with bzr-git.

Actually my initial wish was for Launchpad to be able to host git repositories, but this is unlikely to happen anytime soon, so having a "git view" of a bzr branch would be great.

[Peter Bex (peter-bex)]

I just created bug #651844 requesting git pull support. This ticket can be closed again.

[Aurélien Gâteau (agateau)]

Thanks Peter, closing this one as invalid.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

We just had another request for publishing externally. I can see use cases for doing both : publishing to external sites, and allowing direct reads from bzr hosted repos using git. So I'm reopening this.