Bazaar manage multiple branches at once

Question

I'm using Bazaar quite some time now, but at the moment I'm searching a solution to the following problem:

Assuming you've got several developers with everyone developing in its own branch, like this:

Project
|
|----Branch 1
|
|----Branch 2
|
...

Now, we've got a project manager who wants to have an overview over all branches.

Is there any possibility (using only bzr functions) that he can manage those branches at once?

With "manage", I mean update, commit and perhaps even checkout (last one could perhaps be done with multi-pull but I think this would overwrite existing local data)

Greetings Florian

P.S. I know that this use-case could easily be achieved with SVN (by simply using subdirectories - but without the features of a dvcs) or more or less easily with shell-scripts (something like bzr list-branches|xargs bzr update), but I'd prefer a built-in bzr function

Answer 1

You can see all the branches in a directory tree with:

bzr branches -R /path/to/base/dir

However this works only on the local filesystem. If you need to find branches in a remote system, you need to run the command through ssh or something.

Once you have the list of branches, the manager should branch from them into his local shared repository, preferably configured with the --no-trees option for space efficiency. Existing branches should be pulled instead (using multi-pull for example), removed branches should be removed.

Once he has the branches, the easiest way to overview is using Bazaar Explorer. Open the shared repository location. I especially like the Log button, which will show the tree of logs.

When you say commit... The manager should not commit to the developer branches. If fixes are needed it's better to ask the developer to fix it, otherwise the manager will always have to clean up their mess for them. The manager should only merge other branches to the trunk/main/master. In other words use the gatekeeper workflow.

Answer 2

You can try the bzr-externals plugin or the bzr-scmproj plugin.