unicode & more

[Jeff Rose]

Hello everyone,
  I'm just starting a linux port of a small OSX app my roommates wrote,
and we wanted to use bazaar-ng so we can get familiar and eventually
help out.  Anyway, on the very first commit after initializing a new
tree it crashed with this unicode handling exception:

--------------------
$bzr ci

bzr: ERROR: exceptions.UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode  
byte 0xc3 in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)
   at /opt/src/bzr.dev/bzrlib/config.py line 463
   in _auto_user_id
----------------------

  Any ideas?

  Also, I've seen a bit of traffic about how accessing branches over
http is slower than other mechanisms.  (Although hopefully this is
speeding up...:-)  What do people recommend we use for now?  Is sftp
support going to be part of the standard package, or is the standard
usage model to install all the plugins (kind of like gaim)?

  Last, I have a general distributed versioning newbie question.  What's
the typical workflow for using bazaar in a project with a couple people
actively developing?  My roommates and I will probably do a bunch of
hacking while we are away over the holidays, and we'd like to keep in
sync.  Do we each publish our personal branch and then update with all
the other branches to stay in sync?  Do we have a central branch that we
merge with and hope someone else doesn't try to upload while you are
uploading?  How do people work with this type of setup?  I'm already
sold on the bazaar model for plenty of reasons, but a little coaching on
the day-to-day usage would be helpful.  Afterwards I'll be happy to post
a newbie guide to the wiki...  I've found plenty of discussion of the
weaknesses of network connected, centralized systems like subversion,
which I used to use, but it would be nice to have a clear picture of how
a group of developers working on a project interact with each other
using bazaar.

Thanks a lot,
Jeff