bazaar Digest, Vol 47, Issue 82

[Paul Moore]

2009/1/17 Adrian Wilkins <adrian.wilkins at gmail.com>:
>>
>> Maybe if a branch could simply have a "pointer" to a repository which
>> was kept somewhere else, that would do the trick.
>
> bzr co --lightweight /home/my/repo/branch working_tree

But that requires that every "working" branch (where I'm actually
editing files) has to have a corresponding dummy branch in the repo.
And so branching is still not cheap (in this case because of the
additional steps involved, rather than because of elapsed time of the
bzr branch command).

Sorry, but what I want to do is

1. Have a single directory, C:\Bzr, which contains local branches of
the various projects I'm interested in (Python, Bazaar, Vim, ...).
These branches get pulled regularly, but are otherwise untouched.
2. In various directories, be able to simply do bzr branch
C:\Bzr\some-project quick-hack and have it work sufficiently rapidly
for it to be a plausible option when I just want to try out something
as small as a 5-line change.

I can do this with Mercurial - hg clone uses hard links to avoid
copying files around. I can't with Bazaar. This isn't an issue in
itself, what *is* an issue is the way that, whenever this comes up,
the response is essentially either "you shouldn't work like that", or
something like you suggest which adds extra steps that make the
branching process more complex than I describe in (2).

Anyway, as I said, this was only an example, so I won't labour the
point - it's old ground anyway.

Paul.