8. Getting The Latest¶
If someone else has landed changes on a package, you will want to pull those changes in your own copies of the package branches.
8.1. Updating your main branch¶
Updating your copy of a branch that corresponds to the package in a particular release is very simple, simply use bzr pull from the appropriate directory:
$ cd tomboy/tomboy.dev
$ bzr pull
This works wherever you have a checkout of a branch, so it will work for things like branches of saucy, trusty-proposed, etc.
8.2. Getting the latest in to your working branches¶
Once you have updated your copy of a distroseries branch, then you may want to merge this in to your working branches as well, so that they are based on the latest code.
You don’t have to do this all the time though. You can work on slightly older code with no problems. The disadvantage would come if you were working on some code that someone else changed. If you are not working on the latest version then your changes may not be correct, and may even produce conflicts.
The merge does have to be done at some point though. The longer it is left, the harder may be, so doing it regularly should keep each merge simple. Even if there are many merges the total effort would hopefully be less.
To merge the changes you just need to use bzr merge, but you must
have committed your current work first:
$ cd tomboy/bug-12345
$ bzr merge ../tomboy.dev
Any conflicts will be reported, and you can fix them up. To review the
changes that you just merged use bzr diff. To undo the merge use bzr
revert. Once you are happy with the changes then use bzr commit.
8.3. Referring to versions of a package¶
You will often think in terms of versions of a package, rather than the
underlying Bazaar revision numbers. bzr-builddeb provides a revision
specifier that makes this convenient. Any command that takes a -r
argument to specify a revision or revision range will work with this
specifier, e.g. bzr log, bzr diff, and so on. To view the versions of
a package, use the package: specifier:
$ bzr diff -r package:0.1-1..package:0.1-2
This shows you the difference between package version 0.1-1 and 0.1-2.