James, when you compared configs/aliases, did you know about the 'config-manager' package? Its in debian, and install a command 'cm' which reads bazaar format configs or can be piped into it through standard in.

Config-manager supports configuration creation and introspection for tla, CVS and Subversion. I'm part way through a rewrite of config-manager into python. The python version supports check-out and update for baz and bzr.