launchpad-users team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Marsden <jmarsden@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mackenzie Morgan wrote:

> On Tuesday 07 April 2009 2:10:02 pm Mike Rooney wrote: 
> > Have you tried to do this on a fresh Windows install, and then get bazaar to
> > recognize it? I gave up after about 20 minutes, and really all I wanted to
> > do was checkout publicly available code. It may be quite simple for
> > intermediate-advanced users in the linux world, but I challenge your
> > assertion in the general case :)

> I'm always surprised when I hear of Windows users using bzr and Launchpad 
> because in my mind they're so tied to Ubuntu.  ...

One approach that works on Windows (I just tried it) is to use Cygwin. 
It has a working bzr package, and so you can:

(a) Install Cygwin, being sure you install their bzr package as part of 
the install (or re-run the Cygwin setup.exe and install bzr later, if 
you forget!)

(b) Start a Cygwin shell.

(c) In the Cygwin shell, type:

  scp -pr me@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:.ssh/ . # Copy my keys
  bzr whoami "My Name <me@xxxxxxxxxxx>"        # Tell bzr who I am
  bzr launchpad-login mylpid                   # Tell bzr my LP id
  bzr branch lp:~someplace/whatever/branch     # Grab stuff

Unless you have a *very* slow Internet connection, this really does not
take 20 minutes!  If you don't want to grab your keys from your real 
machine to the temporary Windows box, you can generate a new keypair 
instead using ssh-keygen (see 
https://help.launchpad.net/YourAccount/CreatingAnSSHKeyPair ) and tell 
LP about that, instead.

In my test case, I already had Cygwin on this Windows machine, so I
just ran cygwin-setup.exe and added bzr, and then ran the 4 commands
listed under (c) above with my own name/email/lpid info rather than the 
generic example ones shown.  They worked, first time.

There are almost certainly more Windows-GUI-oriented ways to do this 
(via TortoiseBZR maybe?  And Putty?), but bzr is mainly used by 
developers anyway, and I'd hope that most developers are capable of 
using a command shell, at least at this basic level of entering a few 
commands, whether on Windows or on Ubuntu or on any other OS.

Jonathan