Comment 2 for bug 818206

Hmm, I thought I already replied to your email but I don't see it in
Launchpad so trying again. Apologies if you get this twice.

On Mon, 2011-08-01 at 00:41 +0000, Martin Pool wrote:
> I think there is definitely a chance to avoid people getting in to
> trouble here.
>
> Before we get in to possible solutions let's be clear on what we want to
> allow, encourage, or avoid.
>
> * Being able to make stacked branches from the command line is useful, at least for developers and for testing
> * Having hidden (but working) options seems likely to confuse people who do have a reason to look for it (a warning might be better, as long as it's easy to recover)
> * Stacking on a remote repository is going to be slow
>
> Some possible solutions:
> * Give a warning when --stacked is used
> * Check there is user documentation of stacking including the drawbacks
> * Show a message when opening a stacked-on branch
> * Create this by init, reconfigure, pull, so the option can be removed from branch
> * Warn (or refuse unless forced) to stack on a branch that's not on the same host as the destination (*)

> Is --stacked really safer with --no-tree?
A lot of the working tree operations require the tree contents, which
are fetched from the stacked-on repository for every tree operation.
This also happens using the VFS, so it's annoyingly slow.

It should be a lot better once stacked branches will start saving the
data they had to fetch anyway.

With --no-tree, there aren't a lot of operations that will actually
fetch the entire tree *and* then discard the contents. There are still
some, though, so I'm not sure how useful it is to distinguish between
--tree and --no-tree in this regard.

Cheers,

Jelmer