Repositories
============


Repositories in Bazaar are where committed information is stored. There is
a repository associated with every branch.

Repositories are a form of database. Bzr will usually maintain this for
good performance automatically, but in some situations (e.g. when doing
very many commits in a short time period) you may want to ask bzr to
optimise the database indices. This can be done by the 'bzr pack' command.

By default just running 'bzr init' will create a repository within the new
branch but it is possible to create a shared repository which allows multiple
branches to share their information in the same location. When a new branch is
created it will first look to see if there is a containing shared repository it
can use.

When two branches of the same project share a repository, there is
generally a large space saving. For some operations (e.g. branching
within the repository) this translates in to a large time saving.

To create a shared repository use the init-repository command (or the alias
init-repo). This command takes the location of the repository to create. This
means that 'bzr init-repository repo' will create a directory named 'repo',
which contains a shared repository. Any new branches that are created in this
directory will then use it for storage.

It is a good idea to create a repository whenever you might create more
than one branch of a project. This is true for both working areas where you
are doing the development, and any server areas that you use for hosting
projects. In the latter case, it is common to want branches without working
trees. Since the files in the branch will not be edited directly there is no
need to use up disk space for a working tree. To create a repository in which
the branches will not have working trees pass the '--no-trees' option to
'init-repository'.

Related commands::

  init-repository   Create a shared repository. Use --no-trees to create one
                    in which new branches won't get a working tree.