Mirroring Bazaar repository into Git on a Mac

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This article is based on “Mirroring Bazaar Repositories with Git” article written by Nick Charlton in 2015 (thank you!), updated for 2020 and focused solely on using a Mac with Homebrew.

Introduction

I want to create a version of Ubuntu/Debian’s update-motd for other distros, in particular for RedHat/Centos 7 used at my company.

(Why and how is a topic for another article, please follow me if you are interested in that!)

I found the source repository with the package that provided this feature in Launchpad here, but as it’s an Ubuntu package, it is hosted on Launchpad using Bazaar.

I wanted to keep the history of the code but also to work using Git and on GitHub, so I had to do a conversion.

How-to

1. Install bazaar and a plugin to make it work with git

brew install bazaar

bzr-git is the git plugin for Bazaar. I provide a custom brew formula for it as a tap you. You can check the code of this formula here.

brew tap gdubicki/tap
brew install gdubicki/tap/bzr-git

2. Clone the Bazaar repository

I got below command directly from the update-motd Launchpad page, top-left corner. It creates a local branch of the project from Launchpad (‘lp’), branch ‘update-motd’.

bzr branch lp:update-motd

3. Create the Git repository

You can create it where ever you usually create your hosted repositories — GitHub, GitLab… But DO NOT initialize the repo with anything (like adding a README).

All you’ll need is the URL to the repo, in my case:

git+ssh://git@github.com/gdubicki/update-motd-for-non-ubuntu.git

Yes, you NEED to use git+sshas protocol.

4. Push the clone to the remote

The final step is to push you Bazaar branch to Git repository:

cd update-motd # or whatever is the name of the Bazaar repo/branch
PYTHONPATH="/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages" bzr dpush -v git+ssh://git@github.com/gdubicki/update-motd-for-non-ubuntu.git,branch=master

(The reason for having to use this custom PYTHONPATH is that Homebrew’s Bazaar and its bzr-git plugin are using macOS system Python 2.7, but most probably your default one nowadays is Python 3 from Homebrew.)

You should now have a full copy of all of the original bazaar history, but now all configured with git.

Legal

The original article is available under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. This article is available under the same license.