SCM discussions in the GNOME community

[David Cournapeau]

Hendy Irawan wrote:
> 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 think the main description on bzr's website is quite right: it 
performs well on project with a few thousand files (I don't know 
revision-wise, never had any problems with it for projects with several 
thousand files and several thousand revisions; this does not mean of 
course there are none, just that I have never hit them).
>
> 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).
This sounds really bad. As I said, I think network-wise, bzr still has 
significant performance problems, but not as bad as in your case. Maybe 
something is wrong somewhere in your setup ? If pushing to launchpad was 
so bad, I think that nobody would use it, frankly. I have not used it 
extensively, and do not remember such a problem myself. Maybe you should 
fill a bug if you can reproduce the problem ?

cheers,

David