How to retrieve branch whose tree has been removed and deleted?

Question

I have a bazaar repository holding several branches. I recently removed one of the trees with bzr remove-tree path/to/branch followed by rm -r path/to/branch. Now if I understand correctly, the repository should still hold the branch history, since I never did bzr remove-branch. However, I can't figure out how to retrieve the branch to continue working on it. Can someone help?

Answer 1

You can use bzr heads --dead to see the heads (= most recent revisions) of deleted branches, including their global revision ids.

You can then do:

bzr branch -r REVISION_ID REPO_DIR BRANCH_DIR

Here, REVISION_ID is the id of the head that you want to restore, REPO_DIR is the directory that holds the repository, and BRANCH_DIR is the directory where you want the branch to be stored.

Edit: If the above doesn't work for some reason, you can also do:

bzr init BRANCH_DIR
cd BRANCH_DIR
bzr pull -r REVISION_ID .

BRANCH_DIR must be underneath the repository directory, of course.