How to get the diff between two arbitrary remote revisions?

[Kevin Smith]

Jan Hudec wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 17, 2005 at 18:10:08 +0100, Matthieu Moy wrote:
> 
>>Jan Hudec <bulb at ucw.cz> writes:
>>
>>>Of course their 'branches' are no branches, but rather 'multibranches'. 
>>
>>I don't know more than "diff/add/commit/status" in mercurial, but from
>>what you describe, mercurial's "branches" are what bzr will implement
>>as "repository" (or "archive").
> 
> 
> With two significant differences:
>     - As I read the discussion, bzr archives are going to require explicit
>       names for the heads (btw. git does too, or at least that I was told).
>       Mercurial does not.
>     - Mercurial does not plan decoupling the storage and working copy. Though
>       with their model there is really no principial reason for the coupling.
>       (The reason is really principial only in Darcs (everything is a set of
>       changesets there), but with bzr 'privileged head' it's a lot more
>       justified than in mercurial.)
> 

One more difference, at least in practice if not as an absolute 
technical limitation:

An hg "branch" can have multiple heads, but only contains work for a 
single project. As I understand it, a bzr repo would be more similar to 
a CSV repo or a monotone database, potentially containing branches of 
several completely unrelated projects.


To summarize:

With darcs, a working tree cannot contain anything other than what is in 
the branch/repo. To revert the working tree to an earlier version, you 
must discard that history from the repo.

With hg, a branch can contain multiple heads, and the working tree can 
be checked out from any of them, or from any other version in the 
history. Typically you would reposition the working directory by 
specifying a tag name, although you can give a revision hash.

I'm not as clear on bzr. Is the intention that a bzr branch will only 
contain one head, but the working directory can be checked out from any 
version in the history?

Kevin