Migrating from Bazaar to Git on Launchpad just got easier!

Debian recently switched from Alioth to Salsa offering only Git hosting from now on and that simplifies the work of exiting contributors and also helps newcomers who are most likely already familiar with Git if they know at least one version control system. (Thanks to everyone involved in the transition!)

On Ubuntu’s side, most Ubuntu-specific packages and big part of Ubuntu’s infrastructure used to be maintained in Bazaar repositories in the past. Since then Git became the most widely used version control system but the Bazaar repositories did not fully disappear.

There are still hundreds of packages maintained in Bazaar in Ubuntu (packaging repositories in Bazaar by team) and Debian (lintian report) and maintaining them in Git instead could be easier in the long term.

Launchpad already supports Git and there are guidelines for converting Bazaar repositories to Git (1,2),  but if you would like to make the switch I suggest taking a look at bzr-git-mass-convert based on bzr fast-export (verifying the result with git-remote-bzr). It is a simple tool for merging multiple Bazaar branches to a single git repository set up for pushing it back to Launchpad.

We (at the Foundations Team) use it for migrating our repositories and there is also a wiki page for tracking the migration schedule of popular repositories.

One thought on “Migrating from Bazaar to Git on Launchpad just got easier!

  1. Pingback: Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 556 – Mags Forum Technology

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