Feedback on migration to bzr

Martin Pool mbp at sourcefrog.net
Tue Oct 30 11:29:01 GMT 2007


Thanks for the feedback Matthew.  I hope your continuing use of Bazaar
goes well, and we'd welcome more as it goes along.  Most of these
issues are already known to us to some extent but one at least is new,
and it's useful to hear when things impact users for better or worse.

> 1. -sub-trees format issues. I used bzr-svn to import the repository,
> and discovered that this uses this format by default which is not
> supported by the default bzr shared repository. This means that:
> (a) When I tried to download the new branches into a normal shared
> repository I got an error message which I didn't understand - it
> didn't specify the problem or reference any documentation at all.
> (b) I was a little concerned initially when I found out that we were
> using experimental functionality without being informed of this by the
> relevant web pages in advance - subsequently I was reassured that the
> format is unlikely to create issues for us.
> (c) People wishing to download our branches into existing shared
> repositories they have cannot do so.

This has been a bit of a hot topic recently between Jelmer (who wrote
bzr-svn) and Aaron (who did subtrees).

> 2. Being unable to browse the working tree via http. Obviously, this
> is a basic functionality which svn does well. It was one of the
> features we needed before considering the move to bzr. Unfortunately,
> we are currently unable to do this because of this bug:
>
>  https://bugs.launchpad.net/loggerhead/+bug/158584/

Does that totally block it, or just make some pages broken (which
would still be bad)?  I'd hope there's some way we can work around
that by just

> 3. Wishlist - Launchpad doesn't support server-side shared
> repositories.

I'm at the Launchpad planning meeting now.  Fixing this is one of
Launchpad Code's  planned features for the next six-month cycle, and
I'm confident we will get there.

> * Better error messages - the python traceback messages are pretty
> hard to understand and generally don't give any hints to the beginner
> what the actual problem is.

Users should never see a message with a traceback - thus the
invitation to report them to us.  If you do see one, or a
non-traceback message that is unclear or unhelpful, please let us know
either on irc, mail, or by filing a Launchpad.net bug.

> * Better progress reporting - the progress bar is pretty inaccurate
> when pushing and downloading branches. Without doing any detailed
> analysis, we've tended to find that it starts at about 40%, stays
> there for most of the download time, then skips to 100% pretty
> quickly. Also, it's hard to understand what's going on with the 1/4
> message on the right hand side of the progress bar. I haven't delved
> into the bug list to see what is already there on this issue, but a
> simple and single progress bar with an accurate percentage would be
> helpful.

So the reason this happens is that a typical operation like branch is
composed of a few major phases, each of which can take time -- the
main ones are copying revisions, copying file data, and building the
working tree.  The idea was that we'd show just one progress bar,
divided up by phase, so the user can see the overall progress to the
target, rather than thinking they're almost done only to have a new
bar pop up.

However some of the phases are faster than others so the bar
progresses nonlinearly, and as you say things like 'merge phase 1/5'
don't mean much to users.

I'm coming to think it would be better just to display one bar for
each top-level operation, and make sure there's a clear message.

Also, though this will be a little more work, it would be nice to get
the transport to tell us the bytes transferred and rate.

Thanks very much for the feedback.

-- 
Martin



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