[MERGE] improved help on storage formats

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Ian Clatworthy wrote:
> We frequently get people asking on the mailing list and
> IRC about which storage format they ought to select.
> This patch improves the help by:
> 
> * including a decision tree (based on some emails by
>   Robert Collins)
> 
> * including some suggestions from John Arbash Meinel,
>   e.g. moving knit-based repositories into the
>   deprecated list.
> 
> It would also be good to include more information on
> rich-root vs non-rich-root. My preference though is
> to do that as a separate patch. (To provide answers
> to the questions users have about that - compatibility,
> performance, etc - warrants a new, additional help topic
> me thinks).
> 
> Ian C.
> 

As a thought. What about completely hiding deprecated formats unless
"--verbose" is given. With some minimal text saying that you can use
"--verbose" to see more formats.

Then we can hide all of the weave and knit formats, the different
"dirstate-XXX" variations, and the -subtree variations. (For now you
should use -rich-root and not -subtree.)

That gets us down to pack-0.92, rich-root-pack, 1.6, 1.6-rich-root, 1.9,
1.9-rich-root.

My personal feeling would be to push 1.6 into the "don't use unless you
really know you need it" category. I guess I would wait until Launchpad
supports 1.9 first. 1.9 provides all the benefits of 1.6 and then some,
and 1.6 has never been a default format, so people who are using it
shouldn't have too much of a problem.

I guess one could argue that the default view of formats would be:

  --latest-'best'-format
  --default-format
	(use bzr help formats --verbose if you want to see all the rest)

Anyway, I think this is a worthy update

BB:approve

I just wonder if we can do more.

John
=:->

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