Comment 4 for bug 125067

There is a branch around which does this. It was part of my fixing "bzr push" and "bzr branch" to initialize a branch object so that they could be resumed. The original change got kicked because of Robert's concern of having an empty branch show up during "bzr push".
But the "bzr branch" code is probably still reasonable.

I believe the code is at:
https://code.launchpad.net/~jameinel/bzr/fix-push2

and is associated with bug 45504. (There was another fix that I also wrote for the bug, which I think is fix-push-alt).

Someone could probably clean that up so it just contains the changes to .sprout() (and not to .clone()).