For a brief period of time I was totally sold on Bazaar (AKA bzr) for my distributed version control needs. Then I found out about github and the rest is history. bzr is neat and has it’s advantages but github is just too hot a community to pass up. Building skills on both would be great but realistically I’m only going to get good at the one that I use consistently. So, git wins for me.
When I was using bzr I accumulated a bunch of code in bzr repositories that I now want to convert to git. There are a bunch of tutorials out there on how to do this but they all didn’t work for some reason or another. Here I have step by step instructions on how to move from bzr to git, with any branches you have created, that should work without fuss on both Debian and Ubuntu.
These instructions assume the following:
You have a bzr repository that you’d like to become your master git branch that currently resides in a directory called bzr-master.
You have one branch you’d like to bring into git as “branch-1” that currently resides in a directory called bzr-branch-1.
You want to call your new repository git-repo.
Obviously, you will have different master and branch names so fill those in appropriately. They are bold faced and italicized where you will need to replace the names.
Step 1: Install bzr.
sudo apt-get install bzr
Step 2: Install bzr-fastimport.
sudo apt-get install bzr-fastimport
Step 3: Go to the parent directory that contains your two bzr branches in your shell.
Step 4: Create the new git repository and stay in that directory
mkdir git-repo ; cd git-repo ; git init .
Step 5: Pull the master branch into git
bzr fast-export —export-marks=../marks.bzr ../bzr-master | git fast-import —export-marks=../marks.git
Step 6: Pull branch-1 into git
bzr fast-export —marks=../marks.bzr —git-branch=branch-1 ../bzr-branch-1 | git fast-import —import-marks=../marks.git —export-marks=../marks.git
Now if you do a git branch you should see the master branch as well as branch-1. Check the logs to make sure they’re complete, nuke the marks.bzr and marks.git files, and then push them to github! :)