Strange bzr handling of parent location from bzr branch when $HOME uses a symbolic link.

[David Ingamells]

The following has been observed in bzr version 1.17 on an Ubuntu 8.04 
machine.

(I have not verified this with the bzr 2.0 series due to the infamous 
bug 375013 that has stood for several months at high priority but is 
still not even assigned to a developer)

On a new machine our IT set up the directories as follows:

1) users got /home/<user> as their login directory (from /etc/passwd)
2) /home is a symbolic link to /volumes1/home, thus the user's real home 
directory files are in /volumes1/home/<user>

The master repository is located at /data/id/repos/<project>/<version> 
this is the hard location (no links involved)

<user> logs in on this machine does the following commands

$ cd $HOME/projects
$ bzr branch --stacked /data/id/repos/<project>/<version> <local>
$ bzr info <local>

which says that the location of the parent repository is at 
"/volumes1/data/id/repos/<project>/<version>". Notice the /volumes1 in 
the path! Any bzr command on this <local> branch that needs to use the 
parent location fails with a "cannot find ..." type error.

It /seems/ that bzr gets confused with the fact that $HOME names a 
symbolic link.

Changing /etc/passwd to give the user's home as /volumes1/home/<user> 
and repeating the above commands (after a logout and login and of course 
removing the defective branch created above) solves the problem.

Maybe someone can check if this is an issue in the 2.0  series and if so 
submit the above as a bug (or let me know and I'll submit the bug)?

Greetings,
David