I ran into this today as well, though the default error is now even more verbose with bzr 1.2.0 on FreeBSD (python 2.5):
[tim@dalek ~/tmp/demo]$ bzr checkout [tim@dalek ~/tmp/demo]$ bzr checkout bzr: ERROR: File exists: u'/usr/home/tim/tmp/demo/.bzr': [Errno 17] File exists: '/usr/home/tim/tmp/demo/.bzr'
I ran into this today as well, though the default error is now even more verbose with bzr 1.2.0 on FreeBSD (python 2.5):
[tim@dalek ~/tmp/demo]$ bzr checkout home/tim/ tmp/demo/ .bzr': [Errno 17] File exists: '/usr/home/ tim/tmp/ demo/.bzr'
[tim@dalek ~/tmp/demo]$ bzr checkout
bzr: ERROR: File exists: u'/usr/