[RFC] Vanilla checkouts in 2.2

[Martin Pool]

> How does this fit in with the goals/constraints poolie and I were
> discussing at the end of the other thread.
>
> I'd really like to see a big picture emerge here, not single stabs.

To avoid dealing with this in lots of little fragments, I'd like to
see a list of the use cases and how they would work under this model,
like

  if you just want a readonly mirror of a remote branch, where you can
look at the tree and the history...
    ... run 'bzr branch URL' and then 'bzr pull' to update it

(Those command are what we would say now; I'm not saying they're
optimal and I would hope to see them replaced.)

Maybe that's already in Matthew's docs or we should start from there.

As far as keeping partial history locally: it does sound cool, but I
think Robert is right in assessing that there may be some heavy
lifting to implement it, or otherwise the risks of some continuing
fallout.  Maybe not, but I would be leery of merging it in without
getting a more thorough review and a commitment everyone will look
after it.  It might be a good thing to try in a plugin, if we add some
extension points for a lookaside cache around repositories.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>