Notes When Upgrading

Release 0.8 of bzr introduces a new format for history storage, called ‘knit’, as an evolution of to the ‘weave’ format used in 0.7. Local and remote operations are faster using knits than weaves. Several operations including ‘init’, ‘init-repo’, and ‘upgrade’ take a –format option that controls this. Branching from an existing branch will keep the same format.

It is possible to merge, pull and push between branches of different formats but this is slower than moving data between homogenous branches. It is therefore recommended (but not required) that you upgrade all branches for a project at the same time. Information on formats is shown by ‘bzr info’.

bzr 0.8 now allows creation of ‘repositories’, which hold the history of files and revisions for several branches. Previously bzr kept all the history for a branch within the .bzr directory at the root of the branch, and this is still the default. To create a repository, use the new ‘bzr init-repo’ command. Branches exist as directories under the repository and contain just a small amount of information indicating the current revision of the branch.

bzr 0.8 also supports ‘checkouts’, which are similar to in cvs and subversion. Checkouts are associated with a branch (optionally in a repository), which contains all the historical information. The result is that a checkout can be deleted without losing any already-committed revisions. A new ‘update’ command is also available.

Repositories and checkouts are not supported with the 0.7 storage format. To use them you must upgrad to either knits, or to the ‘metaweave’ format, which uses weaves but changes the .bzr directory arrangement.

Improvements

• sftp paths can now be relative, or local, according to the lftp convention. Paths now take the form:

  sftp://user:pass@host:port/~/relative/path
  or
  sftp://user:pass@host:port/absolute/path

• The FTP transport now tries to reconnect after a temporary failure. ftp put is made atomic. (Matthieu Moy)

• The FTP transport now maintains a pool of connections, and reuses them to avoid multiple connections to the same host (like sftp did). (Daniel Silverstone)

• The bzr_man.py file has been removed. To create the man page now, use ./generate_docs.py man. The new program can also create other files. Run python generate_docs.py --help for usage information. (Hans Ulrich Niedermann & James Blackwell).

• Man Page now gives full help (James Blackwell). Help also updated to reflect user config now being stored in .bazaar (Hans Ulrich Niedermann)

• It’s now possible to set aliases in bazaar.conf (Erik Bågfors)

• Pull now accepts a –revision argument (Erik Bågfors)

• bzr re-sign now allows multiple revisions to be supplied on the command line. You can now use the following command to sign all of your old commits:

  find .bzr/revision-store// -name my@email-* \
    | sed 's/.*\/\/..\///' \
    | xargs bzr re-sign

• Upgrade can now upgrade over the network. (Robert Collins)

• Two new commands ‘bzr checkout’ and ‘bzr update’ allow for CVS/SVN-alike behaviour. By default they will cache history in the checkout, but with –lightweight almost all data is kept in the master branch. (Robert Collins)

• ‘revert’ unversions newly-versioned files, instead of deleting them.

• ‘merge’ is more robust. Conflict messages have changed.

• ‘merge’ and ‘revert’ no longer clobber existing files that end in ‘~’ or ‘.moved’.

• Default log format can be set in configuration and plugins can register their own formatters. (Erik Bågfors)

• New ‘reconcile’ command will check branch consistency and repair indexes that can become out of sync in pre 0.8 formats. (Robert Collins, Daniel Silverstone)

• New ‘bzr init –format’ and ‘bzr upgrade –format’ option to control what storage format is created or produced. (Robert Collins, Martin Pool)

• Add parent location to ‘bzr info’, if there is one. (Olaf Conradi)

• New developer commands ‘weave-list’ and ‘weave-join’. (Martin Pool)

• New ‘init-repository’ command, plus support for repositories in ‘init’ and ‘branch’ (Aaron Bentley, Erik Bågfors, Robert Collins)

• Improve output of ‘info’ command. Show all relevant locations related to working tree, branch and repository. Use kibibytes for binary quantities. Fix off-by-one error in missing revisions of working tree. Make ‘info’ work on branches, repositories and remote locations. Show locations relative to the shared repository, if applicable. Show locking status of locations. (Olaf Conradi)

• Diff and merge now safely handle binary files. (Aaron Bentley)

• ‘pull’ and ‘push’ now normalise the revision history, so that any two branches with the same tip revision will have the same output from ‘log’. (Robert Collins)

• ‘merge’ accepts –remember option to store parent location, like ‘push’ and ‘pull’. (Olaf Conradi)

• bzr status and diff when files given as arguments do not exist in the relevant trees. (Martin Pool, #3619)

• Add ‘.hg’ to the default ignore list. (Martin Pool)

• ‘knit’ is now the default disk format. This improves disk performance and utilization, increases incremental pull performance, robustness with SFTP and allows checkouts over SFTP to perform acceptably. The initial Knit code was contributed by Johan Rydberg based on a specification by Martin Pool. (Robert Collins, Aaron Bentley, Johan Rydberg, Martin Pool).

• New tool to generate all-in-one html version of the manual. (Alexander Belchenko)

• Hitting CTRL-C while doing an SFTP push will no longer cause stale locks to be left in the SFTP repository. (Robert Collins, Martin Pool).

• New option ‘diff –prefix’ to control how files are named in diff output, with shortcuts ‘-p0’ and ‘-p1’ corresponding to the options for GNU patch. (Alexander Belchenko, Goffredo Baroncelli, Martin Pool)

• Add –revision option to ‘annotate’ command. (Olaf Conradi)

• If bzr shows an unexpected revision-history after pulling (perhaps due to a reweave) it can now be corrected by ‘bzr reconcile’. (Robert Collins)

Changes

• Commit is now verbose by default, and shows changed filenames and the new revision number. (Robert Collins, Martin Pool)
• Unify ‘mv’, ‘move’, ‘rename’. (Matthew Fuller, #5379)
• ‘bzr -h’ shows help. (Martin Pool, Ian Bicking, #35940)
• Make ‘pull’ and ‘push’ remember location on failure using –remember. (Olaf Conradi)
• For compatibility, make old format for using weaves inside metadir available as ‘metaweave’ format. Rename format ‘metadir’ to ‘default’. Clean up help for option –format in commands ‘init’, ‘init-repo’ and ‘upgrade’. (Olaf Conradi)

Internals

• The internal storage of history, and logical branch identity have now been split into Branch, and Repository. The common locking and file management routines are now in bzrlib.lockablefiles. (Aaron Bentley, Robert Collins, Martin Pool)
• Transports can now raise DependencyNotPresent if they need a library which is not installed, and then another implementation will be tried. (Martin Pool)
• Remove obsolete (and no-op) decode parameter to Transport.get. (Martin Pool)
• Using Tree Transform for merge, revert, tree-building
• WorkingTree.create, Branch.create, WorkingTree.create_standalone, Branch.initialize are now deprecated. Please see BzrDir.create_* for replacement API’s. (Robert Collins)
• New BzrDir class represents the .bzr control directory and manages formatting issues. (Robert Collins)
• New repository.InterRepository class encapsulates Repository to Repository actions and allows for clean selection of optimised code paths. (Robert Collins)
• bzrlib.fetch.fetch and bzrlib.fetch.greedy_fetch are now deprecated, please use branch.fetch or repository.fetch depending on your needs. (Robert Collins)
• deprecated methods now have a is_deprecated flag on them that can be checked, if you need to determine whether a given callable is deprecated at runtime. (Robert Collins)
• Progress bars are now nested - see bzrlib.ui.ui_factory.nested_progress_bar. (Robert Collins, Robey Pointer)
• New API call get_format_description() for each type of format. (Olaf Conradi)
• Changed branch.set_parent() to accept None to remove parent. (Olaf Conradi)
• Deprecated BzrError AmbiguousBase. (Olaf Conradi)
• WorkingTree.branch is now a read only property. (Robert Collins)
• bzrlib.ui.text.TextUIFactory now accepts a bar_type parameter which can be None or a factory that will create a progress bar. This is useful for testing or for overriding the bzrlib.progress heuristic. (Robert Collins)
• New API method get_physical_lock_status() to query locks present on a transport. (Olaf Conradi)
• Repository.reconcile now takes a thorough keyword parameter to allow requesting an indepth reconciliation, rather than just a data-loss check. (Robert Collins)
• bzrlib.ui.ui_factory protocol now supports get_boolean to prompt the user for yes/no style input. (Robert Collins)

Testing

• SFTP tests now shortcut the SSH negotiation, reducing test overhead for testing SFTP protocol support. (Robey Pointer)
• Branch formats are now tested once per implementation (see bzrlib. tests.branch_implementations. This is analagous to the transport interface tests, and has been followed up with working tree, repository and BzrDir tests. (Robert Collins)
• New test base class TestCaseWithTransport provides a transport aware test environment, useful for testing any transport-interface using code. The test suite option –transport controls the transport used by this class (when its not being used as part of implementation contract testing). (Robert Collins)
• Close logging handler on disabling the test log. This will remove the handler from the internal list inside python’s logging module, preventing shutdown from closing it twice. (Olaf Conradi)
• Move test case for uncommit to blackbox tests. (Olaf Conradi)
• run_bzr and run_bzr_captured now accept a ‘stdin=”foo”’ parameter which will provide String(“foo”) to the command as its stdin.