Performance and cross platform testing update

[Ian Clatworthy]

All,

Just a quick note to let everyone know what I'm currently working on. As 
we push to Bazaar 1.0, the focus is on reliability, performance, 
documentation and portability. While John and many others are doing a 
great job of fixing bugs quickly, my personal focus is on the other 3 
priorities:

1. Performance. I'm working towards nightly benchmarks of Bazaar so we 
can be confident that changes do not introduce performance regressions. 
In addition to the bundled benchmark suite, I'm working on benchmarking 
large source trees over numerous Use Cases. There is a lot of work 
underway to improve how quickly bzr operates (e.g. Andrew and Robert's 
HPSS work) and we want to measure the improvements as they become available.

2. Documentation. I'm working through as much documentation as I can 
checking that things are correct, clearly explained and looking for 
gaps. In recent weeks, my focus has been on the man page (generated 
largely from embedded help) and the Developer Guide (a.k.a. HACKING). In 
coming weeks, I'll be focusing on the other user documentation: 
tutorial, etc.

3. Portability. In addition to the Linux and Mac machines here at home, 
I'm setting up a Windows VM that will be running the bzr test suite 
against bzr.dev every night. We want to make sure that bzr works and 
works really well on Windows. If problems are introduced, we want to 
know about them ASAP so we can correct them ASAP.

In summary, the goal is to ensure that Bazaar is quick, easy to learn 
and reliable on all major platforms. "Easy to learn" is hard to test but 
functional correctness and performance across major platforms can and 
will be checked daily soon.

If anyone has any thoughts on any of the above, please let Martin or I 
know. Lots of people are working on each of the areas above and we want 
to ensure we're coordinating our collective effort.

Cheers,
Ian C.