Newbie's questions

[Matthias Rahlf]

Hi,

I'm new to Bazaar and just played with it to find out how it can change
my life. ;-) The documentation did its best to clear things up so far,
but a few questions are still unanswered. I'm posting them without a
specific order:


Although the help message states that warnings were given "if any
of the named files are already versioned", there is none.
$ pwd; bzr revno; bzr status; ls README
/tmp/bzr.dev
2150
README
$ bzr add --no-recurse README
$ bzr add README
$


This error message could be a little more user friendly:
$ bzr add .bzr
bzr: ERROR: Cannot operate on <bzrlib.add.FastPath object at 0xb75ee44c>
because it is a control file
$


Which of the following solutions is right? Are they both? What's the
difference?
>From the tutorial:
    To move your changes from one tree to another, use
    % cd NEWDIR
    % bzr merge --uncommitted OLDDIR
>From the FAQ:
    1.8. How to move uncommitted changes from one tree to another
    The best way is to use the shove command from the BzrTools plugin.


The README inside the .bzr control directory forbids changing any of the
files inside. Is this also true for .bzr/branch/branch.conf?
>From .bzr/README:
    This is a Bazaar-NG control directory.
    Do not change any files in this directory.
But in ConfiguringBzr:
    Each branch can also contain .bzr/branch/branch.conf, which stores
    information about the branch in the branch itself.


In bzrlib/commands.py I read about the options "--no-plugins",
"--no-aliases", "--builtin", "--profile", "--lsprof". The bzr command
gives no hint that these exist or how to use them. Is this intended?


Isn't the description of the general workflow in BzrUsingBoundBranches
unneccessarily complicated? Doen't the following suffice?
    * Push a branch to somewhere else, perhaps your ISP.
    * Bind your branch to the this (remote) branch.
>From BzrUsingBoundBranches:
    The general workflow looks something like this:
        * Push a branch to somewhere else, perhaps your ISP.
        * Make sure the pushed branch is up to date
        * run bzr checkout LOCATION-OF-REMOTE-BRANCH to get a checkout
          of the remote branch.
    [...]
    To turn a regular branch into a checkout:
    $ cd somebranch/
    $ bzr bind sftp://me@here.com//home/me/somebranch/


The help message from "bzr help status" says that if "no arguments are
specified, the status of the entire working directory is shown." But it
seems to me that the status of the working _tree_ is shown.
$ pwd; bzr status
/tmp/dir
modified:
  subdir1/file1
  subdir2/file2
$ cd subdir1/; bzr status
modified:
  subdir1/file1
  subdir2/file2
$ bzr status .
modified:
  subdir1/file1
This applies to other commands, too. Coming from CVS this will be an
obstacle for me, because in a subdirectory of a project "cvs commit"
(and the like) deals only with changes in this directory and its
subdirectories.


Although I saw mainly developer issues on this list I hope this is the
right place for these questions. If not, please tell me where they
shoudld go to and ignore this email.

thanks and bye, matthias
-- 
"For man with no forgiveness in heart, life worse punishment than
death."                            -Mr. Miyagi in "Karate Kid II"