[RFC] info output light vs heavy checkouts .

[Olaf Conradi]

On Thu, Jun 15, 2006 at 12:30:53PM -0500, John Arbash Meinel wrote:
> I think it would be nice to have a lot less special casing in the 'bzr
> info' code. I usually work in a local repository with my branch bound to
> a remote repository. (The local one has working trees).
> 
> In this situation, it doesn't print the 'bound_branch' lines at all, so
> there is no public command to get the bound target, so I have to 'cat
> .bzr/branch/bound'
> I know Alexander has a plugin 'bzr paths' which prints out all of them.

I missed that particular use case.

When I made it, the separation of the bzr directory was done and quickly
followed by the concept of repositories. And some confusion whether
checkout == bound branch. Around that time bzr info was lacking support
for it, and not all use cases were properly identified.

> But I think the problem is our special casing, which means each path has
> to handle all the permutations.

True, I tried a few different implementations at that time with more and
some with less code paths. The current one seemed logical at that time.

When developing I had a --debug switch which just printed out all the
values of each variable. But I do not think of that as good UI to the
user. The current code tries to make it apparent which construct is
being used, light or heavy checkout, part of a shared repository or not,
etc.

 -Olaf