Storage Formats
===============


To ensure that older clients do not access data incorrectly,
Bazaar's policy is to introduce a new storage format whenever
new features requiring new metadata are added. New storage
formats may also be introduced to improve performance and
scalability.

The newest format, 2a, is highly recommended. If your
project is not using 2a, then you should suggest to the
project owner to upgrade.


.. note::

   Some of the older formats have two variants:
   a plain one and a rich-root one. The latter include an additional
   field about the root of the tree. There is no performance cost
   for using a rich-root format but you cannot easily merge changes
   from a rich-root format into a plain format. As a consequence,
   moving a project to a rich-root format takes some co-ordination
   in that all contributors need to upgrade their repositories
   around the same time. 2a and all future formats will be
   implicitly rich-root.

See :doc:`current-formats-help` for the complete list of
currently supported formats. See :doc:`other-formats-help` for
descriptions of any available experimental and deprecated formats.