DVCS comparison for our organisation: decided

Ben Finney bignose+hates-spam at benfinney.id.au
Tue Oct 16 09:05:35 BST 2007


Ian Clatworthy <ian.clatworthy at internode.on.net> writes:

> Ok. We clearly have some work leave to do to make finding things in
> our doc clearer then. Can I ask which version you evaluated? If
> 0.91, did you look at the doc installed along with the package or
> just the web site?

We were trying to find the functionality via websites and user
discussions. Community support and testimonies was judged to be a
useful metric of feature maturity.

We did find the documentation for Python calls as hooks, but passed
over it since we were searching for external command support.

> We are *very* focussed on performance right now - that's part of the
> reason for my delayed response. If by cold startup, you mean
> 
>   bzr version
> 
> after first installing it compared to running that command a 2nd time,
> that's always going to go against us because of the interpreted nature
> of Python - we load more libraries than Hg. It's a pretty meaningless
> measure though IMHO.

For our purposes, it's very important that cold startup be fast. If
the command takes a long time to do a cognitively simple task —
whatever the reason — then the user is going to subconsciously put off
future invocations of the tool just that bit longer, sometimes to the
detriment of the purpose of version tracking. Fast startup time is
*very* important to make using the tool a natural part of workflow,
rather than a chore to be worked around, even for a few minutes.

So, if Bazaar is inherently slow for very simple operations, then
whatever the technical reason, it disqualifies itself from our
evaluation. If "loads more libraries" is the cause, perhaps libraries
should be loaded only when it's clear they'll be needed.

A tool that is optimised for the common cases will be used far more
readily by our target user base than one that loads a great deal of
functionality that is not needed for most invocations.

> Yes thank-you. We'll take the feedback on board and make some
> changes in coming months to improve things.

Glad to help, and good fortune in improving Bazaar.

-- 
 \     "As I bit into the nectarine, it had a crisp juiciness about it |
  `\          that was very pleasurable - until I realized it wasn't a |
_o__)            nectarine at all, but A HUMAN HEAD!!"  -- Jack Handey |
Ben Finney




More information about the bazaar mailing list