What's the right way to make a backport recipe for bzr-builder?

Question

I maintain some packages in LP that I need to backport to oneiric, lucid and --- even --- hardy.

For example, my trunk branch builds correctly to precise and quantal, and I want to create a separate lucid-backport branch (not necessarily a fork of trunk) which only contains the modified debian/control and debian/compat files needed for the backport to lucid. Then I like to write a bzr-builder recipe to combine both branches someway.

What's the right way to do this?

Answer 1

If your packaging is part of the base branch rather than in a nested branch, you could probably use the merge d in your recipe.

Simply branch your of your package, make your Lucid compatibility changes and commit them. Now you can write a recipe something like:

# bzr-builder ...
lp:.../base-packaging-branch
merge lucid-backport lp:.../lucid-compat-packaging

You should now get all the changes from the base branch with your Lucid compatibility fixes layered on top. If there are conflicts during the merge your recipe will fail to build, but you probably want to know about that anyway. Fixing this should be as simple as merging the changes into the Lucid branch and fixing the conflicts.