Comment 9 for bug 896809

No need to "be afraid" of bzr :)

I say this as somebody who had very little prior experience with version control, who started to run leo from trunk early (though not immediately after leo developers started to use bzr), who started to use bzr in write mode as first distributed version control for personal pet projects and who already doesn't use it - not because bzr is bad, just because I found alternatives which I like more.

A repository is a big pile of code, many versions of same code. It keeps all the history of changes, that's why the initial download (bzr branch) takes long. It creates a local copy on your computer (that is the point of distributed version control). After that you only do bzr pull to get changes that aren't in your local copy yet.

This is enough for running leo from trunk, yet it gives you a big directory with many bzr-specific files which you may not need as read-only bzr user if your goal is to run leo only.

bzr export is different - it exports only a single revision of the code from the repository, not the whole history. It is still working code which you may use to run leo, but it's not coupled to the repository with all history anymore.

If you are used to think of programs in terms of executable files - leo is written in Python. This is a scripting language - python files are plain text files with python source code. You just run a python interpreter with launchLeo.py as argument (assuming you have python/qt and other eventually needed dependencies already installed) or use some automation tricks like batch files / file associations in windows or shell wrapper scripts to avoid typing much.

 I am used to see such discussions in google group where we can go more detailed and not keep our posts strictly technical and very short. By no means am I trying to hint that this bug report is not appropriate for launchpad - it is very valuable because it emphasises the problems leo starters have and make them more exposed to the community (which I like to think is more biased about such problems and tends to overlook them because they are shadowed by that leo experience they already have).