08:16 < abentley> Better phrasing: 'what circumstances should cause us to produce a working tree in a repository branch'?

[Denys Duchier]

Erik Bågfors <zindar at gmail.com> writes:

>> I think it would be better to always require an explicit
>> --standalone option when a standalone branch is desired.
>>
>
> Please no.
>
> I like the way bzr works right now and I think that it should be the
> default. A newbie user shouldn't HAVE to know about working trees,
> repositories, etc. He/She should just go "bzr branch http://..." to
> start to contribute to an existing project, or go "bzr init" to work
> on his/her own.
>
> I'd rather see --repo.

I am fine either way - I just want the behaviour to be always transparently,
predictably, the same.  However I find slightly it odd that both you and Aaron
seem to believe that creating standalone branches is going to be the most useful
default.  In my experience, that is absolutely not the case for non-developers
(which is about every one out there).  They just want a convenient way of
working on the same stuff (like papers, grammars, other kinds of data, possibly
software (but not in the advanced way we see that)).  For them, a
non-centralized model would be a major hassle.  They can just barely cope with
the centralized model.

As a developer, I also expect that most of my work will use a bunch of branches
organized around a project-specific repo.

So, I guess I think that standalone branches will never be the right default
either for me nor for most of the people I know (whether developers or not).

Cheers,

--Denys