Problems with push and branch

[Joseph Wakeling]

Hello all,

First off: is there really no built-in search option for the mailing
list archives?  There doesn't appear to be.  I did look through the
gzipped text and do text searches with my web browser, but didn't come
up with anything useful regarding the problems described herein...

Anyway, I'm a physics PhD student, and by most standards a pretty crummy
computer person, but I've reached the point where it seems worthwhile to
have revision control software for my code.  A distributed version seems
better suited both to my needs (I run my code on various computers in
different locations) and has better possibilities.  It was easier to get
the latest version of bazaar-ng installed on my openSUSE system than the
latest version of git, so I'm going with this.  I'm using bzr-0.7 on
openSUSE 10.0.

I've managed to set up a basic repository using bzr init, added the
files I want to track, created a .bzrignore file, and the whole
revision, commit, tracking whatever seems to be fine.  However, I'm
having problems in propagating the code to other locations.

I have a few remote computer systems/clusters that I use to run
simulations (access via ssh), and it would be best of all to have
separate bzr branches on each, so that occasionally when I might work on
a remote system I can pull back any changes that might be worthwhile. 
However, since I'm not in control of whether bazaar-ng is installed on
those systems, as a second-best option I'd like to be able to develop on
my own machine and then just upload all the latest code, automatically,
to the remote systems.

Anyway, I've tried commands as follows:

    bzr branch . ssh://myname@remote.computer.com/home/myname/location/

and also,

    bzr push ssh://myname@remote.computer.com/home/myname/location/

and in both cases got the same error: "bzr: ERROR: Parent directory of
ssh://myname@remote.computer.com/location/ does not exist."

On the other hand, when I tried to set up a branch on my own machine for
development experiments, all worked fine: delightfully so, in fact.

So what's wrong?  I've tried the commands with respect to remote
location directories that exist, and those which don't and would have to
be newly created.  I've also tried alternative ways of specifying the
URI [e.g. ssh://myname@remote.computer.com:~/location/ ]  and got the
same result.  Since on my openSUSE system, konqueror appears to use the
fish:// prefix for ssh connections, I tried using that for the remote
URI, again with no difference.

Is it simply that bazaar-ng is not installed on the remote system and
needs to be, or is there something wrong about what I'm trying to do?

... and ... assuming that I can't get bazaar-ng installed on those
systems any time soon, how do I solve my problem of automatically
copying across the latest committed version of code in my repository to
remote machines, short of doing it by hand?

Many thanks,

          -- Joe