confused by repositories

[Jamie Wilkinson]

This one time, at band camp, John A Meinel wrote:
>Aaron Bentley wrote:
>> Ilpo Nyyssönen wrote:
>>> John A Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> writes:
>>>
>>>
>>>> But this only sets what the default will be for a new branch, and as
>>>> mentioned, running 'bzr checkout' in that directory will create a
>>>> working tree.
>>>
>>> Is there a command for removing the working tree?
>> 
>> No.  Personally, I like to keep my checkouts separate from my repository, so
>>  - I can 'rm -r' the checkouts without losing data
>>  - I can publish my repositories with rsync
>>  - I can back up my repoitories without including redundant working trees
>>  - All the inactive branches don't clutter up my working area.
>> 
>> Aaron
>
>For ease of use, I create a public and a local repository. So I have:
>
>sftp://juju/srv/bzr/public/branches/bzr/
>
>As my public repository, accessible over http from:
>http://bzr.arbash-meinel.com/branches/bzr
>
>And then I create a local repository at:
>~/dev/bzr
>
>To set this up, I do:
>
>$ ssh juju
>$ bzr init-repo /srv/bzr/public/branches/bzr/
>$ exit
>$ bzr init-repo --trees ~/dev/bzr
>$ cd dev/bzr/
>$ bzr init new-project
>$ cd new-project
># do stuff, and commit
>$ bzr push sftp://juju/srv/bzr/public/branches/bzr/new-project
>$ bzr bind sftp://juju/srv/bzr/public/branches/bzr/new-project

Can you elaborate on behaviour here?  I too have a public "repository" (a
bunch of standalone branches on a webserver), and a bunch of standalones on
my laptop, primary development machine.

If I switch to your workflow, does a commit always push to the bound branch?
How's that perform?

What are the paths to projects like within the repository, on your working
repo and your public repo?

What happens if I'm offline?  Do I need to manually unbind?  If so, does the
unbind only need to happen once?

If so, do you automate your bind/unbind somehow? :-)  (I'm terribly lazy :-)

Some of these may seem obvious to you developers, but as a user still on
standalone branches, there's a whole basket of jargon that's not familiar to
me.

I'm hoping answers to my questions above can help work out both why I'd want
to use repos in the first place, and also best practices and expected behaviour when using them.

... and I'll write a Wiki page introducing repositories...

>$ ssh otherhost
>$ bzr init-repo /public-repo
>$ exit
>$ bzr init-repo ~/local-repo
>$ cd dev
>$ bzr checkout --lightweight ~/local-repo/branch
>
>I'm not sure how he does the binding, but it does keep his repositories
>(both local and remote) clean from working trees.

So again, if there's no working trees in the repo, how do branches appear
within the repo?

Thanks,