SCM discussions in the GNOME community

[Hendy Irawan]

David Cournapeau wrote:
> I have myself tried bzr on repositories at least as big as gtk, with 
> several thousand revisions. My main grip with bzr performances is 
> network wise: it takes already something like what, 10 minutes, to 
> branch out bzr frommainline for me. And bzr size is by all account 
> negligeable compared to gnome: if you want to build basic gnome from 
> sources, how long will it take just to get the sources ? One hour ? 5 
> hours ? More ? This is the main concern.
>
> My opinion is the following: I think bzr is pretty good (I don't know 
> much other DSCS outside arch), but has a pretty bad press performance 
> wise (this is totally unscientific, but almost everytime I mentioned 
> bzr with respect to some projects I am involved with and know that bzr 
> could handle them, this is one of the main concern). My fear is that 
> people are advocating bzr for projects where it will not work well, 
> and as such increase th bad press problem: having one more blog 
> article bzr is cool but cannot handle project foo is worse than no 
> article at all, I think.
>
> So before advocating it, I think it is important to see whether bzr 
> can handle a repository the size of gnome: if I want to build core 
> gnome from source repository, I need something like 160 packages 
> according to jhbuild. Let's say there are 1000 files per package, each 
> with 5000 revisions for simplification. How long does it take to get 
> the sources if they are all under bzr ?
>
> Cheers,
>
> David
>
I really want to know where (in what kind of projects) does "bazaar 
performance quite good".

I've been having about Bazaar performance locally. But anytime I want to 
"bzr push sftp://" it's NIGHTMARE. Does anyone ever have good results 
with this? Please let me know if you do.

And my project isn't at all big. It's a 25 MB repository (Bazaar+du 
says) and it takes a few *HOURS* to simply push to Launchpad's using 
SFTP. (bazaar.launchpad.net/~ruby-id/bukuruby/trunk) And that's pushing 
FROM a speedy *server* that has abundant bandwidth (a few Mbps at least).
 
I have a smaller branch/repo on Launchpad and it takes a few minutes to 
do a push, esp. initially... it only contains a Ruby on Rails app of 
almost negligible size. (bazaar.launchpad/~ceefour/bukuruby/web) Using 
SVN it'll take less than a minute to do even the initial push.

What I think is that the PR is somewhat misguided, and I *was* 
misguided. I had hoped and optimistic about Bazaar's performance. All 
good *except* when I do "bzr push sftp://". As long as this _particular_ 
command is still slow then I would not say that "Bazaar performance is 
good". I'm eagerly waiting for the new algorithm and the smart servers 
implemented on Launchpad...

-- 
Hendy Irawan
www.hendyirawan.com