Re: bzr repository ready?

[Richard Stallman]

    > Maybe I misunderstood something.  I thought the idea was to make
    > a local checkout from a remote repository.  Are you saying people
    > should always copy the whole repository first?

    Because I don't know how experienced you are with Bazaar yet, I don't
    know if you're using the word "repository" in the CVS sense or in the
    Bazaar sense, above.  The two meanings are very different.

    What I meant when I said "the repository is local too" is that history
    is local, and...

We are failing to communicate, because that's not what I was talking
about at all.

    In Bazaar, copying "the whole repository" is easy, and costs about the
    same as copying just one branch,

I see your point, but that difference isn't what I was talking about.

I'm asking about how to use lightweight checkouts.  Someone
recommended them for people not writing lots of changes.

When you make a lightweight checkout, do you have to first make a
local repository and get the branch into it?  Or can you make a
lightweight checkout straight from the remote repository?

I got the impression that the lightweight checkout was recommended
because it avoids the need to make a local repository.  The questions
I've asked are based on that understanding.  The answers I get seem to
suggest the contrary, that the lightweight checkout is made from a
local repository.  But if that's true, I don't see what good the
lightweight checkout does.  Why not edit the local repository's source
files directly?

In other words, after doing 

   bzr branch URL_TO_UPSTREAM_EMACS_TRUNK

why not just go ahead and edit the files in the directory
for that branch?

The text in the wiki seems to say that you pull over a branch with
`bzr branch', and doesn't say anything else is necessary before you
use it.

Is that true?  Once you do that command above, what is the state?
What can you actually DO with the branch at that point?
Do you have to make a checkout from the branch in order to get
source files you can use?