Unpack or read a bazaar patch file?

Question

I have a bazaar patch file from a couple of years ago that I would like to be able to read the contents of. It was generated with "Bazaar Explorer > Bazaar > Collaborate > Send new revisions > by file".

How can I turn the part after # Begin bundle into a plain text diff file or similar that can be read by a human?

# Bazaar merge directive format 2 (Bazaar 0.90)
# revision_id: somebody@example.com-20111123173011-19wfgeg3069vggy7
...more metadata snipped ...
# 
# Begin patch
# Begin bundle
IyBCYXphYXIgcmV2aXNpb24gYnVuZGxlIHY0CiMKQlpoOTFBWSZTWdjgvvgAABJfgAAQQGFxUBIA
AACv794QIABkRTaajamQyGjTaRiFGgBMBBkwQhDmaVnH5r9hMFQyJ7EUzThiw4Ixc/mQVpexbPS2
9yLLTxaFbWvXcN2zcydOQxpD652acQC4g4Z96jI5BipgKAAiM5Zz45Kd/4u5IpwoSGxwX3wA

I tried just merging it into the current tree, thinking I could diff from that, but bzr merge oldstuff.patch tells me "Nothing to do." I thought of checking out a branch from that time period and merge again, but that seems pretty heavy weight for such a small thing. Any other suggestions?

Answer 1

Your merge directive is empty :-) It's just, completely empty.

Go to any Bazaar branch that you have, and run this command:

bzr send -o - .

That is, create a merge directive into the branch itself, which will be empty, as you are asking for a "merge to self". The command will print to standard output the empty merge directive, and you'll see that the bundle is exactly the same as the one in your post (using merge directive format 2). This is what an empty merge directive looks like.

Whoever created that merge directive probably specified the wrong target branch: quite simply there were no unique revisions to send that the target didn't already have.