[RFC] Easy workspace set-up proposal

[James Westby]

On Tue, 2009-02-24 at 22:22 +1000, Ian Clatworthy wrote:
> Following feedback from Karl and others putting together the
> scenarios documentation, I've thrown together my latest thoughts
> on how we could simplify the "get me started" processes.
> 
> I've registered a blueprint in Launchpad for this here:
> https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/bzr/+spec/easy-workspace-setup.
> 
> The actual (draft) specification is on the wiki here:
> http://bazaar-vcs.org/DraftSpecs/EasyWorkspaceSetup.
> 
> I'm sure many of us have thought about this issue a lot over time
> so I'd be interested to hear any feedback. If nothing else, we
> should probably turn the "Workspace models" section into an appendix
> of the User Guide, say. (If and when the proposed changes are
> implemented, the information could be presented much earlier.)

Hi Ian,

Thanks for working on this, I really feel this is something that we
need a better answer to.

I agree that this would form a good basis for documentation so that
users could figure out what works for them.

I also like your proposed changes that would make it easy to set up
the workspace that you want.

However, I'm not sure that it goes far enough, as it would leave the
"bzr branch URL" case sub-optimal in my opinion. I realise changing
that would have concerns about existing users, but I feel that having
the obvious case work well is paramount.

Another option would be to have co-located branches in core and advocate
their use primarily, but there are reasons why that's not the system 
that bzr uses, and there are still some cases where you can easily
get bitten.

The other fear would be that having "bzr branch URL" try and be too
clever would be confusing, and make it hard to know what any particular
"branch" invocation would do.

Thanks,

James