How to get the diff between two arbitrary remote revisions?

[Kevin Smith]

Kevin Smith wrote:
> With hg, a branch can contain multiple heads, and the working tree can 
> be checked out from any of them, or from any other version in the 
> history. Typically you would reposition the working directory by 
> specifying a tag name, although you can give a revision hash.

I wanted to clarify that I'm not advocating that bzr move in the 
direction of hg. In fact, my current thinking is that the hg hybrid is 
worse than either of the more pure alternatives. I tend to prefer that 
there be one obvious way to perform a task, rather than the two that hg 
offers.

An hg user has to decide whether to create a new microbranch within the 
same branch, or to create a whole new branch. Generally, I would 
probably keep bugfix forks in the same hg branch, but use separate hg 
branches for feature development. That's partly because hg lacks any 
other way to have cheap branches on non-hardlink systems.

I've mentioned it before, but that's one of the key features I want from 
bzr, and I'm hoping repos will provide it. I'm not familiar enough with 
the technical details to understand the various proposals going around. 
Last I heard, some form of centralized storage or shared history was 
still a goal of bzr. I hope this feature is still on a front burner and 
will be part of the initial repo implementation.

I'm eager to push bzr adoption at work, and cheap branching is one of 
the blockers. Good MS Windows compatibility is another (I'm not quite 
sure where that one stands). The only other thing holding me back is a 
bit of nervousness about the ongoing speed of change 
(weaves...repos...what's next? knits?). Oh yeah, does bzr have tagging 
yet? Well, and having bzr available via apt for hoary. I guess it's not 
such a short list after all :-(

Cheers,

Kevin