How to safely move/rename a branch in a shared repository ?

Hi Alexandre,

Thanks for your question.

To answer it briefly, you're doing it in roughly the right way. We store parent locations as URLs, so if there is no longer anything at that URL then the relationship with that branch is broken. As such, you need to instruct bzr as to where it can find the moved branch, which changing parent_location does.

It seems that there should be a way to do this from the UI, the lack of which is a bug. Once I've confirmed that there isn't a way, I'll file a bug to that effect.

Dan

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 12:45:05PM -0000, Daniel Watkins wrote:
> Question #48161 on Bazaar changed:
> https://answers.edge.launchpad.net/bzr/+question/48161
>
> Status: Open => Answered
>
> Daniel Watkins proposed the following answer:
> Hi Alexandre,
>
> Thanks for your question.
>
> To answer it briefly, you're doing it in roughly the right way. We
> store parent locations as URLs, so if there is no longer anything at
> that URL then the relationship with that branch is broken. As such, you
> need to instruct bzr as to where it can find the moved branch, which
> changing parent_location does.
>
> It seems that there should be a way to do this from the UI, the lack of
> which is a bug. Once I've confirmed that there isn't a way, I'll file a
> bug to that effect.

Also see https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/bzr/+bug/276404

Wouter van Heyst

It appears there is still no support to rename the branch from bzr command line. Or has this support been added since ?

On Wed, 2010-08-11 at 15:23 +0000, thava wrote:
> Question #48161 on Bazaar changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/bzr/+question/48161
>
> thava proposed the following answer:
> It appears there is still no support to rename the branch from bzr
> command line. Or has this support been added since ?
You can rename a branch simply by renaming the directory.

Cheers,

Jelmer

> You can rename a branch simply by renaming the directory.
However, the other branches in the same repository may refer to this project using the old name. It will be nice if a command fixes the repository to update all these links too (by updating the relevant branch.conf files, etc).

Such feature could be useful, and it's possible to have it implemented as plugin. But there is nothing exists yet.

I just had the same wish from one of my bzr users here. He wants to rename a branch but there don't seem to be a nice, user-friendly way to do this.

I thought there would be a bug for this, but I don't see one, so I'll create it.

Well, actually reading this a bit more, there are two things:

One is that it might be nice if you could rename the branch within bzr, rather than by moving the directory; that we can possibly fix.

The other is that there might be other branches, in the same repository or elsewhere on the internet, that refer to the old name. We could fix up the local branches, but it's not going to be possible to find and update branches located somewhere else.