[MERGE] Make typing 'bzr' under win98 do something useful

[Martin]

On 19/06/07, Alexander Belchenko <bialix at ukr.net> wrote:
> Alexander Belchenko has voted -0.
> Status is now: Waiting
> Comment:
> It's indeed should say something useful, but not all the time, and not
> about locking. We should say about working tree format --dirstate.
> Because with old --knit format it works OK.
>
> I vote -0 for first hunk of your patch,
> and +1 for second hunk.

I don't think the status quo is satisfactory. Someone looking for
information currently sees only a couple of vaguely encouraging
statements:
<http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:http://bazaar-vcs.org+windows+98>
<http://bazaar-vcs.org/BzrWin32Installer> "...installer itself is able
to run on Windows 98."
<http://bazaar-vcs.org/bzr/bzr.dev/NEWS> "IMPROVEMENTS: Support for OS
Windows 98."

But when following the tutorial, it doesn't actually work (or give a
useful indication of why it's failing):
----
D:\bzr>mkdir tutorial

D:\bzr>cd tutorial

D:\bzr\tutorial>bzr init
bzr: ERROR: Could not acquire lock Unknown locking error: 0
C:\PYTHON24\lib\site-packages\bzrlib\lockable_files.py:110: UserWarning: file gr
oup LockableFiles(<bzrlib.transport.local.LocalTransport url=file:///D:/bzr/tuto
rial/.bzr/checkout/>) was not explicitly unlocked
  warn("file group %r was not explicitly unlocked" % self)

D:\bzr\tutorial>echo "hello world" > hello.txt

D:\bzr\tutorial>bzr status
bzr: ERROR: Could not acquire lock Unknown locking error: 0
----

And "bzr selftest" just freezes after getting to:
----
[519/6549 in 185s, 177 errors, 1 failed, 27 skipped, 1 missing features]
----

Could of course go through and mark each command correctly as to
whether it should work or not. But that's not been done, and for a
basically defunct platform that's clearly not being tested would
probably be more of a liability than an aid.

Even if the magic of the knit is known somehow, confusing conflicting
feedback is given:
----
D:\bzr\maybe>bzr init --knit

D:\bzr\maybe>bzr status
Working tree format 3 is deprecated and a better format is available.
It is recommended that you upgrade by running the command
  bzr upgrade file:///D:/bzr/maybe/

D:\bzr\maybe>bzr upgrade
starting upgrade of file:///D:/bzr/maybe/
making backup of tree history
file:///D:/bzr/maybe/.bzr has been backed up to file:///D:/bzr/maybe/.bzr.backup

if conversion fails, you can move this directory back to .bzr
if it succeeds, you can remove this directory if you wish
bzr: ERROR: Could not acquire lock Unknown locking error: 0
----

As said, the message can be improved on I'm sure, and maybe where it's
placed, but I think a bzr global notice from platform detection is
more useful and more honest than keeping quiet and pretending that an
undocumented subset of functionality is 'support'.

In summary, I think it should say something useful, all the time, and
about whatever you want it to. Can you suggest an alternative patch
with better warning?

Martin