Support for exposing Launchpad hosted bzr branches as git repositories

[Peter Bex]

Currently, git support in Launchpad is one-way only: it is possible to import an external git repository into a bzr branch on Launchpad, but it is not possible to make improvements made in bzr branches of git repositories available to the original "upstream" authors in an easy way.

If a developer prefers bzr over git, he is currently out of luck if he wants to use Launchpad for developing his own modifications to projects that are using git. Launchpad would be much more useful if it had a way to export bzr branches as git repositories so that external projects that are using git can merge back changes straight from a bzr branch of an imported git repo. It's fine if this support would be readonly (no need to make Launchpad a full git platform).

This is necessary because you can't force people who are developing with git to install bzr and mess with bzr-git integration just to be able to pull changes. (but it would be nice if we were still able to use bzr to do development; otherwise it is very hard to get rid of git on my machine!)

See also bug #648635 (which is about pushing Launchpad hosted branches to external sites using git)

[Jelmer Vernooij (jelmer)]

"bzr serve --git" might be of interest here.

[Tim Penhey (thumper)]

I agree it would be an interesting idea, but we'd need to determine the computational impact here. Not to mention finding someone to do this.