Bazaar-NG Traffic #4 prerelease

[James Blackwell]

Hey guys.

Here's the prerelease for the next installment of Bazaar-NG traffic.
Managed to cram 154 posts down to about 141 lines. 

Welcome to the fourth installment of Bazaar-NG Traffic. This document is a 
weekly summary of the traffic that occurred on The Bazaar-NG mailing list
during the dates of 11 October to 17 October. The summary this week covers
154 posts. The number of posts this week is down because many conversations
are still being actively discussed. No worries; these outstanding posts
will be covered in the next series.

= Storing Config info for Bazaar-NG  =

Rob Collins announced that he was going to start work on gnupg signing
during this week. In this thread, Robert proposed the layout for the ini
storage for user preferences. The thread seemed to close  off with a couple
minor comments from John Meinel and Martin Pool but resurfaced under a new
thread. Most of the discussion of just what to do with ~ in ini files for
Windows users. Often, $HOME is not set for windows users, which results in
"~" not expanding at all. After several solutions were discussed the thread
petered out on approximately Oct 11, without any apparent resolution. 

= Patch Pile from Belchenko =

Alexander Belchenko submitted a handful of minor fixes for inclusion. Rob
was concerned about delaying the 0.1 release and asked that Alexander
resubmit them after release.

= Bazaar-NG 0.1 released =

Martin announced the release of Bazaar-NG 0.1 this week! The tarball is
available at http://bazaar-ng.org/pkg/bzr-0.1.tar.gz and includes features,
bugfixes and more. (Note: At the time of this writing version x.x has since
been released). Reception seemed quiet, as only the only apparent response
was a couple users reporting broken tests.

= Problems upgrading to Bazaar-NG 0.1 =

John and Florian Weimer had a bit of problem pulling bzr.dev after
the 0.1 release. Aaron Bentley replied, noting that "only bzr .1 can
upgrade to bzr 0.1". A useful workaround is to rsync your main bzr branch
rather than pulling.

= Binary File Support =

John was curious on the status of binary file support and asked Aaron about
the status of a patch to add a binary flag to files. The conversation
wandered a bit from automatically detecting tricky text files (consider
UTF-16) to  how subversion used mime-types to how mercurial handles it.
Gustavo Niemeyer helpfully reminded the list that he had submitted a patch
that solves this sort of problem.  The conversation ended up without a good
solution, so if you know how to solve this problem, please suggest
something to the list.

= Documentation cleanups =

Mattheiu Moy provided a handful of patches to clean up the documentation.
He may still be awaiting a merge. Regardless, welcome to the team!

= Tar export for Bazaar-NG =

Eirik Nygaard supplied a patch to provide export for Bazaar-NG, only to
learn that Bazaar-NG already had support built in. Eirik, who upon learning
this hid in a corner in shame, wanted to contribute and had picked
something off the todo list. As a gentle reminder to readers, please mark
off TODO items once you have them merged and place unmerged work on either 
the works in progress page or the awaiting merge page.

= Bazaar-NG supports concurrent access =

Mattheiu Moy asked the list if Bazaar-NG supported concurrent access and
received an answer in the affirmative from John that there was filelocking
for multiple bzr processes. This led to a short discussion to about
ordering operations so that readers could detect writers. One important
note from the conversation: rsync plugins such as the one from John are
safe, while a "raw" rsync (running rsync directly) was not-so-safe.
Additionally, locking on Windows wasn't completely safe either, with a
"almost atomic" lock.

= Annotate updates =

Goffredo Baroncelli posted a patch to the list that added a new --long and
--verbose options. Martin took the patch, after changing --verbose to
--all. The new --long option provides for wider display of fields, while
--all provides for annotation for every line.

= Problems with Unicode dirnames = 

Panagiotis Papadakos had a problem with unicode dirnames, causing a
traceback in bzr. After a second post stating that additionally stated that
he was using 0.1.1, John replied with a request for more information by
asking him to wipe out .bzr.log and running bzr after having run "
"export BZR_DEBUG=1", which Panagiotis provided. A response is still in
wait.


= BzrTools 0.1.1 Out =

Aaron Announced the release of Bzrtools 0.1. Bzrtools is a suite of plugins
for Bzr, including tools such as  push, shelve/unshelve, clean-tree,
graph-ancestry and fetch-ghost. This version catches up with the new api in
bzr 0.1. Followed up by a bug report by Robey, 0.1.1 shortly followed.

= Patch for zsh completion =

Martin merged the zsh completion function from Clint Adams this week. This
gives zsh user the ability to automatically complete for bzr commands.
Clint asked for a few more changes to support zsh and provided a patch as
well.

= More Profiling =

John continued his profiling efforts, this time turning his attention to
read locks. By being a bit smarter with read locks, he was able to cut bzr
cset from 5 seconds down to less than four seconds. This led to a bit of a
discussion about the expectations for and usage of readlocks, which is a
bit too complicated to get into here. If you're interested, look for the
"Branch.lock_read() rather expensive" thread of 15 Oct.

= Merging problems in Win32 =

Alexander reported that he had found the bug in merge that was causing
merge problems in Windows. Aaron replied that he had recently rewritten
that code, and the bug was already gone.

= Fixes for baz2bzr =

David Allouche provided a couple patches to baz2bzr this week, one to fix
problems when /tmp is on a different filesystem and another for performance
improvements. This was followed up by another patch with more performance

= workingtree and branch =

In a thread that is only likely to be of interest to developers, Robert,
John and Martin discussed splitting up the branch interface to deal with
the oversized branch interface. If you work on Bazaar-NG, now is a good
time to keep a close eye out for changing interfaces in this area.

= Problems with large trees =

Rob Holland tried setting up a branch with *79,000* files in it, with
surprising results: By the time he got to 79,001, adding a new file took
just over 8 seconds. John jumped in asking him if he had installed
celementree, to which Rob applied in the affirmative. This thread will
likely continue next week.