How to switch a checkout of a bound branch

[A. S. Budden]

On 29 March 2010 02:19, Stefan Monnier <monnier at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
> If I do:
>
>  bzr branch --bind --no-tree somewhere/foo
>  bzr branch --bind --no-tree somewhere/bar
>  bzr co --lightweight foo baz
>  cd baz
>  bzr switch bar
>
> Bzr tries to switch my `foo' branch to bind to somewhere/bar, rather
> than try to switch my `baz' checkout to point to my `bar' branch.
>
> This is rather unexpected and annoying.
> The only way around it I've found is to do:
>
>  (cd ../foo; bzr unbind)
>  bzr switch bar
>  (cd ../foo; bzr bind)
>
> which is very inconvenient.  Is that done on purpose?

My guess is that it is done on purpose.  My workflow has:

    /path/to/remote_server/     # Shared repository
    /path/to/remote_server/trunk
    /path/to/remote_server/branch1

    # Get heavyweight checkout (aka bound branch) of trunk
    bzr co /path/to/remote_server/trunk local_copy
    cd local_copy
    bzr switch branch1

The use of switch to point to the other branch on the server makes a
lot of sense in this workflow.  What I'd really like to be able to do
is:

    bzr switch trunk
    bzr merge branch1

but instead I have to do:

    bzr switch trunk
    bzr merge /path/to/remote_server/branch1

I guess this was the workflow that someone had in mind when they made
the relative URLs for switch.

Al