branch nicks are poorly explained

[Wouter van Heyst]

I don't explicitly set branch nicks, so I had some trouble trying to explain what they are for to a new user 'feature branches nicely show up in the log' was the best I could think of.

Searching around a bit, we don't seem to explain it in the online help, docs/ or on the wiki.

A bit of #bzr over the course of 10 minutes.

< jvw> right, ok -- btw, I see two branch nicks: dak and debian-archive-kit, what is the practical effect for nicknames, and multiple branches having the same nickname?
< jvw> btw, I googled, but I couldn't find any useful page -- is there some intro on bzr nicknames?
< LarstiQ> jvw: you can explicitly set it, or it will be the basename of the branch root
< spiv> LarstiQ: An introduction would tell you what they're *for*, not how they get set :)
< LarstiQ> spiv: I'm still looking for that ;P
< spiv> Well, not *only* how they get set :)
< jvw> I found how to set them, I was curious about useful *uses* :)

[John A Meinel (jameinel)]

In general, they are just a hint that is used when browsing the log (or by gannotate/visualize).
They can be helpful to indicate why a line was changed ('oh, it was changed in the feature-foo branch').
They are mostly just a hint, but we could improve documentation on this point.