Publishing and updating with Bazaar Version Control

I've written about publishing to a web server using BZR remotely before that involves running bzr serve and then remotely branching and pulling. However I wanted to find another way. Using bzr push sftp://username@host/path/to/directory one can branch from the source to the web server. This method unfortunately does not work like one would expect.

Bazaar still needs one to checkout a working copy from the pushed branch. This means one needs to type on the remote server: bzr checkout path/to/directory www/directory The example checks out a working copy into the published directory on a web server. Yet the process is not complete. One must also go to the www/directory and do mv .bzr .xzr or something similar to disable unauthorized users from branching the source code.

To update the remote working copy one must push the branch out then in the working copy rename .xzr back to .bzr then run bzr pull again. I believe this is highly inefficient and while this is a feature that may not be required by many, and is available as a plug-in, when programming web applications a simple ability to publish and sync working copies is essential.