Changing the UI of checkout

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 02:53:22PM -0400 I heard the voice of
Stefan Monnier, and lo! it spake thus:
> 
> Yes: the problem of "commit --local" is not that it's a bad command,
> but that Bzr currently handles it poorly.  So I think that rather
> than remove it, its hamdling should be fixed.

It IS a bad command, though.  Kinda.  It's coloring outside the lines.
The whole point of a checkout is that you're just a working tree on a
given branch; you don't go out of sync in such a case, you just fall
behind.  commit --local is an intentional statement of going out of
sync in an environment setup to keep IN sync.

Certainly the handling of the case is poor and could be improved.  But
even if it were, the action itself is still very much a platypus.
I've generally thought it should be de-emphasized, but I'm getting
more and more sympathy for the belief that it should just be
eliminated wholesale as an attractive nuisance.  Going out of sync
means you want a bound branch, not a checkout, and for the bound
branch use-case, explicitly unbinding is a much stronger statement
that you know what you're getting into, so it's probably a better
choice.


-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.