Bazaar GUI issue on Windows 7 - adding files using the commandline GUI interface

Due to an unfortunate hard drive issue I recently had cause to swap to a new drive. Along with this came an upgrade from XP to Windows7 (64bit). This was not a real issue, just a bit of hassle moving everything over and re-installing all my applications.

As part of the process I had to re-install Bazaar which I'm using to version control all my work. This appeared to go fine, including the addition of tortoiseBzr to integrate the Bazaar commands into the windows explorer GUI. Unfortunately when I came to use it with my work it gave me an error, I think due to the "special" folders structure in windows7. Here is a copy of the message I posted to the Bazaar user group:

Hi everyone, I hope someone can help me out.

I'm using Bazaar to version control a whole set of different files between a few different machines. On a previous windows XP machine I was able to use the whole user area as my repository and only add the files that I wanted to control.

I have just upgraded to a windows 7 machine (64bit) and there seem to be some issues with the preconfigured folders not being accessible by Bazaar. I have been able to commit files fine, but when I try to open a window to add new files it crashes as it tries to display them, with the error:

bzr: ERROR: [Error 5] Access is denied: u'C:/Users/welf/AppData/Local/Application Data\\*.*'

(It also seems to have issues with "My Music" and similar)

Any thoughts on why it's happening or a way round the problem?

(I suspect that it would work if I had the repository at a lower level without any "windows" folders, but that is not really the way I'd like to work. I don't actually need to version control anything in these folders, so if they can be skipped in some way that would be fine.)

It seems suspiciously similar to an outstanding bug here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/qbzr/+bug/1012907

The general upshot is that I can't add new files to version control using the GUI, although I seem to be able to do pretty much everything else. I thought I would detail the workaround I'm currently using. It isn't too bad, but wasn't totally obvious, so I thought I would document it in case it was of use to anyone else:

1. Right click in the folder containing the files and select the "Tortoise Bazaar" menu item, then select "Run command". A GUI window to allow you to run a command will open.

2. Select "Core" after "Category"
3. Select "add" after "Command"
4. Click "Insert filenames...", a file selecting window will open.
5. Select the files you wish to add (hold 'Ctrl' to select multiple files) and click "Open"

6. Click "OK" and the status window should tell you that the files have been added

You're now at the same stage as if you'd added the files using the standard GUI. Of course you will still need to perform a commit before the files are part of the repository.

Hope that's useful to someone.


UPDATE: Discussion on a Bazaar email list confirms that the problem I'm seeing is due to the error linked above. Unfortunately a fix does not look imminent therefore I'll have to continue using the command-line method described.