Bazaar lightweight checkouts and charm development

Due to the irregular naming used for charms on Launchpad it took me a while to get lightweight checkouts to work in a manner consistent with my lp:juju-core and lp:juju-gui setup.  (Following the guidance from Tim at bazaar-usage.txt.)  For one, my repo couldn’t be named juju-gui since it was already taken, so I used juju-gui-charm.  After making the changes I thought should work I found that lbox failed with:

error: Failed to load focus series for "charms": resource not found

After help from Aaron I discovered the piece I was missing to make lbox work was setting parent_location in my locations.conf file.  So the two stanzas I now have are:

[/home/bac/src]
public_branch = bzr+ssh://bazaar.launchpad.net/~bac
public_branch:policy = appendpath
push_location = lp:~bac
push_location:policy = appendpath

[/home/bac/src/juju-gui-charm]
public_branch = bzr+ssh://bazaar.launchpad.net/~bac/charms/precise/juju-gui

public_branch:policy = appendpath
push_location = lp:~bac/charms/precise/juju-gui
push_location:policy = appendpath
parent_location = lp:~juju-gui/charms/precise/juju-gui/trunk

Hope this helps someone.

Thanks to Diogo Matsubara, we’ll be migrating to tarmac soon for landing our branches. Meanwhile, we owe more thanks to Aaron Bentley, who made a nice way to integrate rietveld and tarmac: the bzr plugin rvsubmit. We can’t use it until tarmac is turned on, but when you want to give it a whirl, do the following:

cd ~/.bazaar/plugins
bzr branch lp:rvsubmit

Congratulations! You’ve installed the plugin. You can read a bit about the new command with bzr rv-submit --help. Notice that the project does not have a hyphen, but the command does.

When tarmac has actually been set up, our workflow initially will be the following.

lbox propose
(Get the reviews you need…)
bzr rv-submit
(Hope that the fragile test suite passes )

Other improvements (like supporting pipelines) might come soon, thanks to Aaron! We’ll be working on making the test suite more robust too.

bzr tip

Using lightweight branches (really helpful for working on Juju) I often would do the following:

bzr switch -b my-new-branch
...
bzr switch trunk
bzr pull
bzr switch my-new-branch
bzr merge

Aaron pointed out I can avoid switching to trunk to just do the pull by creating an alias like:

bzr alias pulltrunk="pull -d :parent"

(Though he suggested “-d :submit” my branches don’t have the submit branch as trunk so i changed as above.  YMMV.)

So now I can just do:

bzr pulltrunk
bzr merge