Comment 3 for bug 937101

> I recently noticed that the head can be checked out in two steps:
> "bzr checkout -r170 bzr://bzr.sv.gnu.org/emacs/elpa" followed by "bzr update".
> So apparently the repository is not really broken, but triggers a bug in Bzr.
I think it's a bit of both. The repository doesn't have that particular node, that's why things fall over.

However, the fetch code in bzr (used by "bzr up") has support for checking for and adding this particular node (and this node only) to deal with upgrades from non-rich-root to rich-root formats.

(unassigning myself since you've managed to recover from this problem)