send

Purpose:

Mail or create a merge-directive for submitting changes.

Usage:

bzr send [SUBMIT_BRANCH] [PUBLIC_BRANCH]

Options:

--body=ARG	Body for the email.
--remember	Remember submit and public branch.
-f ARG, --from=ARG
	Branch to generate the submission from, rather than the one containing the working directory.
-v, --verbose	Display more information.
--mail-to=ARG	Mail the request to this address.
--format=ARG	Use the specified output format.
--no-bundle	Do not include a bundle in the merge directive.
-q, --quiet	Only display errors and warnings.
--strict	Refuse to send if there are uncommitted changes in the working tree, –no-strict disables the check.
--usage	Show usage message and options.
-o ARG, --output=ARG
	Write merge directive to this file or directory; use - for stdout.
-m ARG, --message=ARG
	Message string.
-r ARG, --revision=ARG
	See “help revisionspec” for details.
--no-patch	Do not include a preview patch in the merge directive.
-h, --help	Show help message.

Description:

A merge directive provides many things needed for requesting merges:

• A machine-readable description of the merge to perform
• An optional patch that is a preview of the changes requested
• An optional bundle of revision data, so that the changes can be applied directly from the merge directive, without retrieving data from a branch.

bzr send creates a compact data set that, when applied using bzr merge, has the same effect as merging from the source branch.

By default the merge directive is self-contained and can be applied to any branch containing submit_branch in its ancestory without needing access to the source branch.

If –no-bundle is specified, then Bazaar doesn’t send the contents of the revisions, but only a structured request to merge from the public_location. In that case the public_branch is needed and it must be up-to-date and accessible to the recipient. The public_branch is always included if known, so that people can check it later.

The submit branch defaults to the parent of the source branch, but can be overridden. Both submit branch and public branch will be remembered in branch.conf the first time they are used for a particular branch. The source branch defaults to that containing the working directory, but can be changed using –from.

Both the submit branch and the public branch follow the usual behavior with respect to –remember: If there is no default location set, the first send will set it (use –no-remember to avoid setting it). After that, you can omit the location to use the default. To change the default, use –remember. The value will only be saved if the location can be accessed.

In order to calculate those changes, bzr must analyse the submit branch. Therefore it is most efficient for the submit branch to be a local mirror. If a public location is known for the submit_branch, that location is used in the merge directive.

The default behaviour is to send the merge directive by mail, unless -o is given, in which case it is sent to a file.

Mail is sent using your preferred mail program. This should be transparent on Windows (it uses MAPI). On Unix, it requires the xdg-email utility. If the preferred client can’t be found (or used), your editor will be used.

To use a specific mail program, set the mail_client configuration option. (For Thunderbird 1.5, this works around some bugs.) Supported values for specific clients are “claws”, “evolution”, “kmail”, “mail.app” (MacOS X’s Mail.app), “mutt”, and “thunderbird”; generic options are “default”, “editor”, “emacsclient”, “mapi”, and “xdg-email”. Plugins may also add supported clients.

If mail is being sent, a to address is required. This can be supplied either on the commandline, by setting the submit_to configuration option in the branch itself or the child_submit_to configuration option in the submit branch.

Two formats are currently supported: “4” uses revision bundle format 4 and merge directive format 2. It is significantly faster and smaller than older formats. It is compatible with Bazaar 0.19 and later. It is the default. “0.9” uses revision bundle format 0.9 and merge directive format 1. It is compatible with Bazaar 0.12 - 0.18.

The merge directives created by bzr send may be applied using bzr merge or bzr pull by specifying a file containing a merge directive as the location.

bzr send makes extensive use of public locations to map local locations into URLs that can be used by other people. See bzr help configuration to set them, and use bzr info to display them.

See also:

merge, pull