New to bzr, questions

[Balazs Ree]

Hi!

I've just started to use bzr recently. About my background: I am heavily
using repositories for practically all work. I am an absolute convert of
the distributed model already introduced by Bazaar 1 (tla, baz) and I use
baz for my project works. I however also work with svn on community
projects where I have no influence on the choice of repository, so I would
say I know pretty much all the pros and cons of different system and have
my well settled usage patterns.

I did some experimentation on a sample project and have read the docs
that I found on the wiki. I find bzr is a really great product as it is
now, thank you very much for creating it. I would already think of
switching completely from baz. I understand that with bzr I need to follow
a different workflow and I am open to find the way towards that. But I yet
have the following questions, issues that I would need to understand
better.

1. Do I see well, that with branching all the project contents including
all the revisions are duplicated to the new branch? Of course I
understand the advantages of this. Now the multiplication of space is
no problem as far as personal working areas are concerned, but say, if I
want to publish a project, I have four revisions and a few branches per
each revision to publish, then I need several times the storage place on
the publication server (plus I see all files are uncompressed). Do I see
this correctly?

2. I did not find a way to do a diff between two branches. By "diff" I
mean a diff output of the complete project, not simply a list of missing
patches. This is something I need to do a lot: look at the actual
difference between a branch I am working on and another one. Is there a
way to achieve this? 

3. I would say that svn:externals is really an inevitable thing once you
realize you need it. In baz there is (for good reason) limited support
for this using configs. This is not perfect but quite usable. Is there
some ongoing work in bzr in this direction, that I could check out?

4. Cherrypicking changesets. This is also very important for me and I saw
there is support for this but I could not yet experiment with it.

Thanks in advance for your help.

-- 
Balazs Ree