nest-part unable to nest files

IIRC, nest-part was only intended for directories, not individual files. I'm not sure there's a a good reason for that restriction, other than that it was convenient to implement, so it's probably something we should fix.

Even if we don't allow files, we should at least give a decent error, rather the cryptic error you've encountered.

Yep, at a brief inspection of the code, the MergeIntoMergeType._entries_to_incorporate logic in bzrlib doesn't cope well with the case where the source path is anything other than a directory. It's probably not very hard to fix.

Added launchpad to the bug, as this obviously affects the recipe builds feature.

Oh! On re-reading this, I see that the recipe in this bug description is actually trying to nest a file from the same branch, i.e. a file that already exists at a different path. So this is abusing nest-part to try be 'cp'. I don't think this is something that nest-part should support. If this is really worth doing, we should add a 'cp' (or 'mv'?) directive for it.

I see the current (failing) recipe on <https://code.launchpad.net/~nginx/+recipe/nginx-nightly> does have lines like the ones I was thinking of, e.g.:

    lp:nginx
    …
    nest-part readme lp:nginx/stable docs/text/README README

Which is indeed trying to nest just one file from another branch. That seems reasonable to me (although hopefully most cases of this can be addressed with the 'merge' directive).

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 2:52 PM, Andrew Bennetts
<email address hidden> wrote:
> Oh!  On re-reading this, I see that the recipe in this bug description
> is actually trying to nest a file from the same branch, i.e. a file that
> already exists at a different path.  So this is abusing nest-part to try
> be 'cp'.  I don't think this is something that nest-part should support

This would be the ideal recipe...

# bzr-builder format 0.3 deb-version {debupstream}-svn{revno}-ppa{revno:packaging}
lp:nginx
nest packaging lp:nginx/debian debian
run cp docs/text/LICENSE ./
run cp docs/text/README ./
run cp -r docs/html ./
run cp -r docs/man ./
run aptitude install -y make xsltproc
run make -f docs/GNUmakefile changes

Testing inside of a brand new sid chroot with bzr-builder installed, this seemed to work perfect.

The better option (to keep from needing to be able to install new packages for makefiles...)

# bzr-builder format 0.3 deb-version {debupstream}-svn{revno}-ppa{revno:packaging}
lp:nginx
nest packaging lp:nginx/debian debian
run cp docs/text/LICENSE ./
run cp docs/text/README ./
run cp -r docs/html ./
run cp -r docs/man ./
nest-part changes lp:nginx/stable CHANGES CHANGES
nest-part changesru lp:nginx/stable CHANGES.ru CHANGES.ru

That's probably the most ideal recipe for my case.

So any progress on this? Can we nest-part files from different branch or not?

@Michael Lustfield Run-command simply doesn't work for git build recipes