Re: [Launchpad-users] Your thought wanted on Launchpad code imports

[Bjorn Tillenius <bjorn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 01:17:53PM +1100, Martin Pool wrote:
> Launchpad offers the feature of mirroring branches from cvs, svn and
> git into bzr.  You can use Bazaar to inspect, branch from, and push
> derived branches up to Launchpad, from where they can be linked to
> bugs, code reviews and so on.  (See
> <https://help.launchpad.net/Code/Imports>.)  We plan in future to also
> add hg imports based on bzr-hg.
> 
> To guide our future work, we'd like some feedback on this area of
> Launchpad in particular - please just reply with your answers:
> 
> * Have you ever used imported branches? Do you use this frequently?
> * If you've used it in the past but no longer use it, why?
> * When you use imports, what are you trying to accomplish?

I've used them a few tries trying to contribute to projects that are
using subversion or git. It works great to actually create a bzr branch
and do the work, but at that point you're stuck. Giving your changes
upstream is not an easy task. For git I tried using bzr-git to push to
github, but that didn't work. For subversion I had to send a simply
patch. For one project I had subversion commit acccess, but as I
understand it you can't use bzr-svn, so I resorted to showing them a
patch anyway (well, in the end I convinced them to switch to bzr :))

This is not a problem with the imports themselves, except maybe that
they should use bzr-svn. It's more a problem that the whole story isn't
working. Importing the branches is only one part of the story. We need
to make sure the rest of the story is there as well.

Another thing I've used the imports for is to build local branches of a
project that we use in Launchpad, cherry-picking some patches from
upstream. That worked quite well.


-- 
Björn Tillenius | https://launchpad.net/~bjornt