bazaar should support an 'edit' command like perforce for efficiently supporting workspaces over NFS

Currently, 'bzr status' has to figure out what all is being modified - possibly by doing a 'stat' on each file in the repository. While this might be ok for a local disk, this is terrible for workspaces on NFS. I think future bazaar releases should consider supporting a mode where one needs to explicitly do a 'bzr edit filename' to tell bazaar that it is going to modify a file (same as perforce). Any other files that are modified would not show up in 'bzr status' - in fact, it might be better if files don't have write permissions unless one does an 'bzr edit' on it.

The proposed command 'bzr edit' doesn't need to send any message across the network - it just needs to be recorded in the local repository. This differentiates it from a similar command in version control systems like perforce.