bzr branch makes bogus "No space left on device" claim and dies

[B Smith-Mannschott]

Congrats on moving to bzr! Wish I could get it to work for me.
I'm following the instructions on
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BzrForEmacsDevs .

Branching from savannah failed yesterday due to the "WTF is the trunk"
problem already thoroughly discussed on this list.
I was able to branch from emacs/'main' on launchpad.
I tried branching again today from the 'trunk' branch on savannah as
the aforementioned problem had been addressed.

This, surprisingly began to swill down many megabytes despite the fact
that it was running in the same shared repository as 'main' and I
would have expected 'trunk' and 'main' to have much in common. (This
expectation coming from my experience with git which doesn't fetch
what it already has.)

I eventually killed the job, and decided to start afresh.

Things seemed to work, if slowly. After about an hour, I'd gotten to
about 200MB downloaded. When I next returned to the terminal window
displaying progress, I found "bzr: ERROR: [Errno 28] No space left on
device", which must be in error. (There are 98GB free on the local
file system holding the shared repository; 15GB are free on the
partition holding /tmp and /var/tmp.)

(This is frustrating, especially since My monthly data volumes are
capped by my ISP. It's also something of a downer, as I've been
following emacs development with git quite happily for some time.)

Perhaps someone could make a tarball of the repository available to
make getting bootstrapped more reliable and faster.

Am I doing something wrong? It *is* possible to branch over http, is
it not? (I can't use sftp as I'm not an emacs developer and have no
account on savannah.)

A record or relevant shell incantations follows.

address@hidden:~/m/emacs]
$ bzr --version
No handlers could be found for logger "bzr"
Bazaar (bzr) 2.0.2
  Python interpreter: /usr/bin/python 2.6.2
  Python standard library: /usr/lib/python2.6
  Platform: Linux-2.6.28-17-generic-i686-with-Ubuntu-9.04-jaunty
  bzrlib: /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/bzrlib
  Bazaar configuration: /home/smithma/.bazaar
  Bazaar log file: /home/smithma/.bzr.log

address@hidden:~/m]
$ bzr init-repo emacs
No handlers could be found for logger "bzr"
Shared repository with trees (format: 2a)
Location:
  shared repository: emacs

address@hidden:~/m/emacs]
$ bzr branch --no-tree -v http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/r/emacs/trunk
No handlers could be found for logger "bzr"
bzr: ERROR: [Errno 28] No space left on device

address@hidden:~/m/emacs]
$ du -sh .
72K     .

address@hidden:~/m/emacs]
$ df -h .
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vgone-lvhome
                      199G   92G   98G  49% /home

address@hidden:~/m/emacs]
$ df -h /var /tmp
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vgone-lvroot
                       25G  9.4G   15G  40% /
/dev/mapper/vgone-lvroot
                       25G  9.4G   15G  40% /