Improve help-formats

[Robert Collins]

I hope malone doesn't chew this up...

 affects /products/bzr
 importance medium
 status confirmed

What --help-formats might show in bzr 0.17

shorthand formats:
 'default' 0.15 The default format, recommended by developers with network compatibility back to bzr 0.8, and good local performance
 'oldweaves' 0.6 The bzr format from before 0.8.

tree formats:
 'dirstate' * 0.15 The format used by default since bzr 0.15.
 'xml' 0.8 The format used in bzr 0.8 thru 0.14, 1/2 the speed of 'dirstate'.

branch formats:
 'fairings' 0.17 'tags' with additional support for 'fairings'. This will be the default from bzr 0.18 on.
 'tags' * 0.15 An improved branch format which is faster and supports tags.
 'basic' 0.8 The format used since bzr 0.8.

repository formats:
 'subtrees' 0.15 The current default repository format, this can manage nested branches and tree references.
 'knits' * 0.8 The first release of the current repository database format, this is the current default. Projects that can should consider using 'subtrees'
 'weaves' 0.8 A weave based backend, this is only supported for migration purposes from very old bzr repositories.

To tell bzr what you want as a format you can either choose a 'shorthand' format, or you can specify just the elements from tree, branch and repository formats that you want *different* to the default.
I.e. 'fairings' will take default, and change the branch format, giving you 'dirstate,fairings,knits'.
--
GPG key available at: <http://www.robertcollins.net/keys.txt>.

[Matthew Fuller (fullermd)]

Related (from my UIIssues page): Format names given to --format and the names displayed in 'info' don't have any obvious relation to each other, which is a rather uncomfortable situation.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

Ian improved this page. If more improvements are needed, reopen this and describe them or start a new bug.