brz-svn

Overview

brz-svn lets developers use Breezy as their VCS client on projects still using a central Subversion repository. Access to Subversion repositories is largely transparent, i.e. you can use most brz commands directly on Subversion repositories exactly the same as if you were using brz on native Breezy branches.

Many brz-svn users create a local mirror of the central Subversion trunk, work in local feature branches, and submit their overall change back to Subversion when it is ready to go. This lets them gain many of the advantages of distributed VCS tools without interrupting existing team-wide processes and tool integration hooks currently built on top of Subversion. Indeed, this is a common interim step for teams looking to adopt Breezy but who are unable to do so yet for timing or non-technical reasons.

For installation instructions, see the brz-svn home page: http://wiki.breezy-vcs.org/ForeignBranches/Subversion.

A simple example

Here’s a simple example of how you can use brz-svn to hack on a GNOME project like beagle. Firstly, setup a local shared repository for storing your branches in and checkout the trunk:

brz init-shared-repo beagle-repo
cd beagle-repo
brz checkout svn+ssh://svn.gnome.org/svn/beagle/trunk beagle-trunk

Next, create a feature branch and hack away:

brz branch beagle-trunk beagle-feature1
cd beagle-feature1
(hack, hack, hack)
brz commit -m "blah blah blah"
(hack, hack, hack)
brz commit -m "blah blah blah"

When the feature is cooked, refresh your trunk mirror and merge your change:

cd ../beagle-trunk
brz update
brz merge ../beagle-feature1
brz commit -m "Complete comment for SVN commit"

As your trunk mirror is a checkout, committing to it implicitly commits to the real Subversion trunk. That’s it!

Using a central repository mirror

For large projects, it often makes sense to tweak the recipe given above. In particular, the initial checkout can get quite slow so you may wish to import the Subversion repository into a Breezy one once and for all for your project, and then branch from that native Breezy repository instead. brz-svn provides the svn-import command for doing this repository-to-repository conversion. Here’s an example of how to use it:

brz svn-import svn+ssh://svn.gnome.org/svn/beagle

Here’s the recipe from above updated to use a central Breezy mirror:

brz init-shared-repo beagle-repo
cd beagle-repo
brz branch bzr+ssh://brz.gnome.org/beagle.brz/trunk beagle-trunk
brz branch beagle-trunk beagle-feature1
cd beagle-feature1
(hack, hack, hack)
brz commit -m "blah blah blah"
(hack, hack, hack)
brz commit -m "blah blah blah"
cd ../beagle-trunk
brz pull
brz merge ../beagle-feature1
brz commit -m "Complete comment for SVN commit"
brz push

In this case, committing to the trunk only commits the merge locally. To commit back to the master Subversion trunk, an additional command (brz push) is required.

Note: You’ll need to give pull and push the relevant URLs the first time you use those commands in the trunk branch. After that, brz remembers them.

The final piece of the puzzle in this setup is to put scripts in place to keep the central Breezy mirror synchronized with the Subversion one. This can be done by adding a cron job, using a Subversion hook, or whatever makes sense in your environment.

Limitations of brz-svn

Breezy and Subversion are different tools with different capabilities so there will always be some limited interoperability issues. Here are some examples current as of brz-svn 0.5.4:

• Breezy doesn’t support versioned properties

• Breezy doesn’t support tracking of file copies.

See the brz-svn web page, http://wiki.breezy-vcs.org/ForeignBranches/Subversion, for the current list of constraints.