Bazaar: ERROR: Cannot commit to branch <branch1>. It is bound to <branch2>, which is bound to <branch3>

Question

I am developing an addon for a software. I have a server which works as central repository with the branch trunk. I have a local checkout of trunk, as common practice in DVCS. I then have the directory of the addon (in a path where the software looks for addons) and I develop there, so I can test immediately my changes. That directory is a checkout of some branch, and I if want to start working on another branch I can just do bzr switch otherbranch

For small and immediate edits, I want to commit directly to trunk, without creating a branch and merging that branch into trunk when done. I therefore tried to switch to trunk and commit, but bazaar gives me:

bzr: ERROR: Cannot commit to branch BzrBranch7(file:///srv/openerp/7.0/addons/musgall/). It is bound to BzrBranch7(file:///home/leonardo/openerp/musicgallery/trunk/), which is bound to bzr+ssh://user@ip/~/musgall/trunk/.

Which is correct (and I was pleasantly surprised by how to the point the error message is) but I don't see why it should be a problem. Am I missing something?

Answer 1

Bound branches are common practice in the centralised version control world, but hardly used in distributed version control.

Bazaar does not support multiple layers of bound branches, just one. I'd recommend just using standalone (i.e. not bound) branches here, and pushing between them.