This is a short guide on how to convert your Bazaar repos to git on Launchpad, which is Ubuntu’s development server. Bazaar was chosen by Ubuntu as their revision control system, and the developers did a lot of work on the Bazaar code, which is written in Python. However, development stopped several years ago, and Bazaar was no longer maintained. A spinoff project named Breezy took over, and is maintaining the code, now invoked by the commend brz (but with an alias to former ‘bzr’). Anyway, it’s time to convert my archives to git.

Select “git” and push “Update at the bottom.

You have to make sure you have pulled the latest version of the Bazaar repo.

bzr pull

Stash away the repo directory in a tar file:

tar --xz -cvf repo-save.tar.xz repo-dir

Now initialize the git repo

cd repo-dir
git init .

Export the bzr repo logs and everything, and import directly into git, using the fast-import protocol:

bzr fast-export --plain . | git fast-import
git reset --hard

Now save a copy of the .bzr directory, and perhaps delete it from the repo:

tar -cvJf dot-bzr.tar.xz .bzr
rm -rf .bzr/   # probably not

You can add a remote for your Git repository with the command:

git remote add origin git+ssh://mok0@git.launchpad.net/mmdb

… and finally push the Git branch to Launchpad with:

git push origin master

Note added 2024-06-27

Today I ran into a problem following the above procedure, which did not seem to work. This is what git told me:

git reset --hard
git hist
fatal: your current branch 'main' does not have any commits yet

It turns out I had to checkout master, because git now names the main branch main where bzr fast-export named it master. This is because in ~/.gitconfig I have have set:

[init]
        defaultBranch = main

which probably many people have done, since “master” is a poor name.

$ git checkout master
error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout:
... <list of files that would be overwritten>

I stashed those files away in .tar.gz archive, checked out master and git had all the revisions.

The right way to do it

After running git init, make sure the archive is on branch master:

$ git init .
$ git checkout -b master
Switched to a new branch 'master'

Then proceed to do git fast-import, and be aware that any changes not in the bzr branch will be overwritten when you do git rest --hard.