Comment 31 for bug 45719

Dear Developers,

I just wanted to add my 2 cents as a Bazaar user.

I've been using CVS professionally for years. Recently we switched over to bazaar (main motivation: file renames). I have generally liked the tool, and we use it in a centralized style.

However, I was very surprised that I couldn't "update" my working directory to older revisions in the way I was used to doing with CVS. I have used "cvs update -r" countless times to retrieve earlier versions of the codebase into my working directory, generally to:
* try and track down which change introduced a bug
* compare the performance of different versions on specific testcases
* inspect earlier versions of the code base, for whatever reason

In CVS, this backtracking, time-machine-like ability works well even if some files have been locally modified (those files weren't touched). Indeed, I wouldn't want to be forced to commit changes if I want to backtrack. That said, given how easy it is to uncommit in bzr, there is some wiggle room there.

I think not being able to backtrack a working tree in "cvs update -r" style is a serious and unfortunate limitation of bzr's. Had I known before we committed to using bzr and moved our codebase over, I would have selected another DRCS tool for our projects.

However, I am glad previous postings seem to imply that this issue has been resolved or is being actively fixed. Is it already available in an official release then? If this is not the case, I would strongly encourage the development team to keep this bug fix as a high priority issue.

That said, thank you for your efforts in making what I think is overall a great and easy-to-use tool.

Regards,

Julien