"bzr status" in a lightweight checkout

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Martin Pool writes:

 > There are two main interesting cases for having a wt out of date
 > with its branch:
 > 
 > - 'bzr update -r REVID' to temporarily go back and look at an old
 > revision; presumably in git you would just make a temporary branch
 > coming off that revision

That depends.  If it was really temporary, I'd just use a detached
head.  Ie, "temporary" means I don't expect to forget where I am, and
will check out the branch maintaining the current state again
immediately.  If I wanted to mess with it for a while, yes, I'd
probably make a colocated branch, or perhaps even a separate clone
(with a shared repository).

 > - pushing changes into another branch across a dumb protocol
 > without updating its tree; you can then run 'bzr update' on the
 > remote machine.

But in this case you are going to just do "bzr update" as a matter of
course anyway; you wouldn't need to do a "bzr status".

So in both cases it seems likely that you would not do a bzr status,
anyway, unless you've got a front end that does it behind your back
for some reason.  So I'm still in the dark about why Eric finds value
in having "bzr status" report more than differences between parent
revision and the wt.