Comment 10 for bug 456077

Hello, I got a new report of this, with different conditions, which may help to see clearer.
Colleague uses bzr 2.0.2 (from debian).
Does
 bzr init-repo repo
 cd repo
 bzr branch bzr+ssh://our_central_host/some_branch
it runs for 6 hours and is not completed.
Turns out that the repo he created is in 2a format, because that's the default of init-repo in bzr 2.0.
And our_central_repo is in format "1.9 or 1.14" according to "bzr info -v".
So what happens is likely on-the-fly conversion and he's up for 48 hours, John says above.
Then I say "kill this job, and recreate your repo with 'bzr init-repo --1.9' ". Then the branch completes in 45 minutes.
It's bzr+ssh, not http.
So we have this problem:
as more and more people upgrade to bzr 2.0 (in his case, it was an automatic upgrade, so I didn't expect him to read lots of release notes anyway), they will more and more hit the on-the-fly 48-hour conversion. It will hit Community people branching from Launchpad (and will surely discourage them, I don't think 100% of them will search for a solution on IRC or forums).
Solutions:
1) could you please consider printing a message on stdout when bzr sees that it will do on-the-fly conversion? Something like "we will do on-the-fly conversion from format X to format Y; it may be slow; if you don't want this, create a repo with format X, see 'bzr help init-repo'"? Printing a message has been suggested by a colleague and I like this idea, it does not cost much and can help other colleagues and the Community.
2) in the end we should upgrade our central host to format 2a. But there are lots of things to examine before, among which:
 - how bugfree is 2a? our team is 100 people (Windows, OS X, Linux, Solaris)
 - what minimum bzr version will colleagues need to install to be able to communicate with our central host when it is in 2a format?
 - will mirroring to launchpad break?
 - etc
so this is not for today, which is why I'd like 1) to be considered.
Thanks!