Comment 1 for bug 762330

Likewise, 'bzr checkout --lightweight lp:gcc' downloads almost 8GB of data while project data is less than 1GB (metadata excluded, since it's lightweight).

On the mailing list I got told that lightweight checkouts are not intended for network use, but for local checkouts. In that case light checkouts should be disabled for network protocols, or at least show a big fat warning to the user. It is *very* discomforting for someone to try "lightweight" checkout to be faster than heavy operations, only to wait 5h-6h without progress percentage being displayed to have a clue that it won't finish anytime soon.

I know now that lightweight checkouts are not intended for use over network, but my first impression was that it meant downloading only data, no metadata at all, with all logic being computed server side. I was actually expecting it to be as lightweight as wget...