Some bzr newbie comments (somewhat long)

[Jens Lund]

Hi

I am quite new to bazaar-ng (and distributed version control), and have only 
been making a few experiments during the last 2 weeks, so please bear with 
me if the following comments seem obvious and you have already discussed 
them at length :-)

First of all, I would like to congratulate you on the really, really easy 
start and easy learning curve: given I had Python and cElementTree already 
installed (Ubuntu 5.10), then installing bzr was a matter of 1) download 
tar ball, 2) unpack tar ball, 3) make a symbolic link. It took at most 3 
minutes. Another 5 minutes and I had versioned my first files and started 
to making branches following the easy to read IntroductionToBzr/Tutorial! 
That is really great work! Congratulations! (And in addition it seems like 
a no brainer to publish your own branches even though I haven't done this 
yet.)

Now, a couple of comments that will hopefully help improve bzr/bazaar-ng in 
the future:

http://www.bazaar-ng.org/ links to 
http://mccormickit.com/bzrweb/index.py/repositories for viewing bzr 
branches on the web. I have not seen this link work during the last weeks 
so it should probably link to http://bazaar.canonical.com/WebInterface 
instead. A non working link on the front page gives the wrong impression.

Performance of "bzr branch http://bazaar-ng.org/bzr/bzr.dev" is very, very 
poor. I am on a rather old 400 MHz Pentium machine, but doing "bzr branch 
bzr.dev bzrtest" locally takes
real    2m13.153s
user    1m2.054s
sys     0m7.494s
while doing other stuff. Just downloading the 37MB for bzr.dev (by e.g. 
"rsync -av bazaar-ng.org::bazaar-ng/bzr/bzr.dev bzrtest") takes
real    2m48.159s
user    0m2.048s
sys     0m9.523s
(there is still some problems with permissions on at least 
bzr/bzr.dev/bzrlib/lsprof.py that generates an error.) However, doing "bzr 
branch http://bazaar-ng.org/bzr/bzr.dev" takes *a lot longer* than 1 
hour... I suspect you are somehow making new network connections all the 
time or something similar, and you might already be aware of this as 
indicated on http://bazaar.canonical.com/BzrTips. Of course this should be 
fixed (and I am sure you will), but in the mean time I suggest making a 
comment in the tutorial that it might take a long time as  
http://bazaar-ng.org/bzr/bzr.dev is used as an example of a remote branch.

User interface for rename, move, mv: comming from unix experience it is not 
clear what the difference is between rename, move and mv. Isn't it all the 
same? I haven't looked at the code yet, but the help texts doesn't really 
make the difference clear --- on the contrary the help text for mv 
explicitly mentions renames and moves, the help text for rename gives an 
example of a movement and points to move for what the rename example just 
did, etc. etc. I suggest cleaning up this interface to one command (mv?) 
that can handle all cases of renames and movement of 1 or more files, and 
then remove the two redundant commands from the user interface. (Perhaps 
"renames" should have a "service check" at the same time? I don't know.)

Wiki/website: there is a lot of usefull information there, but it feels 
somewhat unorganized. I would e.g. at some stage suggest to integrate 
BzrRevisionSpec into the tutorial (which is now in the tree, I know) such 
that it by time will grow into a real manual. Also, some more detailed 
information on the internals of how bzr works (revids, inventory, hashes, 
etc.) will be nice: again a lot of information seem to be available in the 
doc/ directory, but it is not clearly organized and it is not clear what is 
ideas and what has been implemented.

The kind of detailed information that could be usefull in the 
tutorial/manual could e.g. be how to get the individual changesets that 
have been merged into a branch as mentioned in the "Disposable branches" 
thread on the mailing list just before Christmas. I do unfortunately not 
have enough knowledge of bzr yet to realize these things without detailed 
information written out... (Hopefully I will get it at some stage!)

All in all I am quite impressed by your work, and will definitely follow it 
in the future as well :-) Keep up the good work!

Best regards,
Jens