Revisit Newbie Bazaar Repository and Branch Setup

[Tom Browder]

The first blush is off the bazzar rose for me now, and I have been
happily using bazaar as I first set it up.  Now I wonder if I didn't
do something wrong and would appreciate some advice.

My goals were to:

1. replace subversion, partially, so I could operate better
disconnected from the company subversion repository

2. replace subversion entirely for my private software and documents

3. operate primarily on my laptop with checkouts of all source from a
single, shared repository on my home server

4. operate disconnected while away from home, rebind when at home

I created the shared bzr repo on my server (call it the central repo),
checked out the several company svn repos into the central repo, and
checked all my private projects also into the same central repo.  Then
I did "bzr unbind" for all the checkouts on the server.

I then created a shared repository on my laptop into which i checked
out all the projects of interest from the central bzr repo on my
server.

Those goals are working for normal operations: I have worked away from
home and returned and rebound to the central repo fine,and I have
periodically rebound to the company repositiry and committed all my
changes.  But when my laptop went unusable for a while, I was forced
to work on the server and had problems trying to work in a project's
working tree in the central repository--I couldn't get the files up to
the latest revision which had been committed from the laptop.

Now I believe I made at least two bad choices:

1. I should not have created shared repositories because each project
is a separate object with essentially no dependency on another.

2. I created the shared repos on the server with trees with and tried
to work in the repo projects which doesn't seem to work.  In order to
work on the server on occasion, such as when I have a laptop problem,
I believe I should do a checkout in a location outside the central
repository.

Questions:

1.  The shared repos have a ".bz" subdirectory at the top level as
well as one in each project.  Can that top-level subdirectory be
removed in order to removed the "shared repository" status?

2.  If it is possible to use the project repos on the server as
working directories, how do I do that?  If I can do that, should I do
that, i.e., is that not a good practice?

Thanks.  I hope I've made the situation and the questions reasonably clear.

Regards,

-Tom

Thomas M. Browder, Jr.
Niceville, Florida
USA