[Python-Dev] Looking for VCS usage scenarios (original) (raw)

Gustavo Niemeyer gustavo at niemeyer.net
Tue Nov 4 14:59:11 CET 2008

Hello Stephen,

I haven't used Bazaar beyond "bzr pull" of Mailman once a week or so, so I don't dislike it. Things I have observed or have seen discussed on the bazaar mailing list that you might want to consider: (1) The UI is as baroque as git's, once you consider all the plugins and GUIs that are available. Lots of different workspace styles (ordinary branching, stacked branching, looms -- similar to quilts?, lightweight checkouts, ...) are supported with a corresponding increase in subcommand count and/or options. (2) New repo formats are added frequently, and taking advantage of new features often requires upgrading your repo format. So-called lightweight checkouts can be especially annoying as they involve leaving the history on the server, making distributed work problematic.

Both arguments strike me as odd. Having the option to leave your history on the server shouldn't be a problem, right? The same goes for (1): having more ways to use the tool isn't exactly a problem.

My understanding is that to deal fully with these problems, the Bazaar developers plan to change the repo file format. Some progress has been made, (small) quantitative improvements have been made, but AFAIK bzr still has bad worst-case performance for some common operations on moderately large repos (way smaller than the Linux kernel).

How large? Which repositories? Which operations? Which version of Bazaar?

I'm sorry for jumping up on this, but you've mentioned one specific issue, which is being looked at, and then have generalized here. Without naming the issues, it's really hard to discuss anything. It is true that Bazaar performance was much worse in the past, and it is true that it's being improved, and will continue to improve. In case Bazaar is a good deal for Python nowadays, it should only get better over time.

-- Gustavo Niemeyer http://niemeyer.net

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