Revisit Newbie Bazaar Repository and Branch Setup

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Tom Browder writes:

 > Confusing to me so I think I won't work inside the repository tree
 > again

Ouch!  Once again, bzr is a *distributed* VCS.  It's not where you
work that matters; that's the whole point of "distributed".  What
matters is the family relationship of your branches, wherever they are
located.  Specifically, you will have this problem if you keep making
checkouts of checkouts, even if they are all standalone branches.

To return to sanity, you can

(1) use only unbound branches (checkout with "bzr branch", completely
    decentralized, probably not what you want )

(2) have a discipline of always using bound branches, and always do
    checkouts from a designated official repository (you can think of
    it as "central" or "canonical" or whatever if "official" doesn't
    ring bells for you).

(3) use lightweight checkouts ("bzr checkout --lightweight") which
    enforces the discipline (a lightweight checkout is not a branch,
    you cannot check out from it).  This has the disadvantage that you
    can't work offline (you can edit files, but you can't check them
    in or check status or differences); a lightweight checkout has no
    revision data, only a workspace and a pointer to the repository.