Branch Formats

[Russel Winder]

On Wed, 2008-12-03 at 10:54 -0600, John Arbash Meinel wrote:

> "bzr upgrade" with no options always upgrades to the *default* format.
> 1.6 and 1.9 are officially blessed, but you have to actually ask for them.

OK, it is good that there is a sane and consistent default, the question
is how is a "mere user" supposed to decide whether to use formats 1.6 or
1.9?  Should people be going straight to 1.9-rich-root?

Trying "bzr help formats" gives me a list of formats.  There is a long
list of formats looking like a complete history of Bazaar formats since
bzr v0.0 and no real guidance as to the fact that there is a history.  I
think there needs to be a lot more thought put into this presentation so
as to make it far clearer what users should be doing with the different
formats.  So the section on Experimental Formats and the section on
Deprecated Formats are very clear -- basically this is background
information of no import for a user.  For the first section there are 11
formats, one designated as the default and not enough guidance about the
others.  OK, one can deduce and infer using information about Bazaar
version numbers quite a lot of information about the fact that half of
the formats are close to becoming deprecated, but I think this
information really needs to be made much more explicit.

Sorry to appear a bit grumpy on this, this issue catches me at a very
irritated moment.   I think the main point is that a lot of the help
assumes you have a lot of background historical knowledge of Bazaar NG.

-- 
Russel.
====================================================
Dr Russel Winder                 Partner

Concertant LLP                   t: +44 20 7585 2200, +44 20 7193 9203
41 Buckmaster Road,              f: +44 8700 516 084
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