Bzr's startup time (was: mercurial / bazaar meeting ?)

[Matthieu Moy]

Martin Pool <mbp at canonical.com> writes:

> It is highly impressive, considering it's Python.  John's cool
> --profile-imports option (now in bzr.dev) gives us a tool for
> finding modules and other things that slow down startup, and we're
> working on eliminating them.  A longer term change is the
> integrated working directory state that Robert posted about recently. 

I think the large number of python imports at the beginning of
builtins.py is also a problem.

For example, to run "bzr version", I need to load builtins.py which in
turn will load many thing in bzrlib to just issue a trivial message.
Similarly, some local operations (bzr ignore, bzr add) will need to
import Branch.

It would probably be wise to split the command functions in
builtins.py into a trivial function doing only the argument parsing,
and calling a function in another file, which in turn would do the
correct imports and perform the actual job.

-- 
Matthieu