Bzr's "confusion" between branches and repositories

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 19:33:12 -0500
> From: "Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden
> 
> Bazaar's very real branch/repo confusion is probably not relevant,

Since you are saying this in quite a few of your blogs and articles,
let's finish this once and for all: there is no confusion.  Bazaar
works on branches, period.  Bazaar is deeply branch-centric, right
down to the level of its DAG topology and the way it handles merges.
A bzr repository is just a convenience for storing several related
branches in a way that saves disk storage, that's all.  With the
exception of a handful of commands that make some sense in a repo
(such as "bzr branches" and "bzr info"), _all_ of the bzr commands
work and are meaningful only in a branch.

If you want another evidence that bzr repositories are just containers
with little user-level impact, hear this: last versions of bzr support
co-located branches, but the result, i.e. several co-located branches
that live in a single disk directory, is _not_ a repository, and is
not referenced as such.  They didn't even agree on a name, before the
development went dark.

You found the "confusion" in what bzr-fast-import does, but that is an
import tool, and has nothing to do with day-to-day bzr ops.  It does
what it does because you will generally import from a repository of
another VCS.

So please, stop disseminating this fallacy.