Question

Obviously bzr clone, bzr branch and bzr checkout all do the same thing when given an URL as parameter and executed in a non-bzr directory.

Is there any difference for later Bazaar workflow? i.e. bzr commit, bzr update and friends.

Answer 1

Branching and cloning are the same, but branching and checkouts are not the same.

$ bzr help branch
...
Aliases:  get, clone
See also: checkout

Looking over the Checkout Tutorial, you’ll see that a checkout essentially binds every action you take directly to the branch. So anything you do is essentially pushed when you do it — obviously that’s a huge workflow difference.

Difference between a Branch and a Checkout

Let’s start by saying there is nothing
you can do with a Checkout that you
can’t do with plain Branches. A
Checkout just enables different
defaults and workflow helpers.

What does Checkout do

With a Checkout, whenever you create
new entries in a local Branch, it also
creates them in a remote Branch. This
corresponds to commands like bzr
commit and bzr pull. If you attempt to
commit a new changes, and the remote
Branch has a different state than the
local one, it will prevent you, and
let you know that you are out of date.
You can use bzr update to apply the
remote changes locally.