1.0 roadmap

James Westby jw+debian at jameswestby.net
Tue Nov 20 21:09:43 GMT 2007


On Tue, 2007-11-20 at 18:23 +0000, William Dode wrote:
> +1
> 
> It will also be difficult to explain every time to the users and 
> benchmarkers of 1.0 that they should use packs...

It seems disingenuous to me to respond to any comment on
the performance of 0.92 (and by extension the planned 1.0)
by saying that they should use packs instead. I realise that
that is where the focus is, and that is where the future
lies and it gives the user an impression of what they can
expect in a future release if they choose Bazaar now.

When Bazaar reaches 1.0 there will be a lot of people that
consider it, or at least just read some blog posts that compare
it to other systems. Some of these comparisons will obviously
include performance, and will probably use the default format.

We know that Bazaar wont compare favourably in many tests with
the current default format. You may wish to answer every of these
posts saying "try packs, they're much faster", but this still
doesn't compare to the experience users will have when actually
using Bazaar.

If one of the points of releasing Bazaar is sending a message that
it is ready to use, and one part of that is fast enough to use,
then you are undermining that by saying that all comparisons must
be done against a non-default format. By making it non-default you
are sending a message that it is not ready yet, and I believe Robert
would say packs aren't ready. I believe this would leave the impression
for many users that Bazaar as a whole isn't quite ready yet, assuming
not all of them actually try it for themselves, as it will work
great for most sized projects, perhaps being let down a little
by network performance.

Another concern I would have is that you may push users on to
packs with 1.0. I don't know what your plans are with schedules
of the updates, but this would lead to them being encouraged
to upgrade formats. I believe that it could be a reasonable
expectation to have life fairly free from these incompatibilities
and upgrades while using a stable series of a program.

I think that it would be better to release with packs as
default and at a stage where they are good enough that users
wouldn't have to upgrade until 2.0, or at least for a good while.

However I realise this will take quite some effort and quite some
time, and there are several reasons to want to get a 1.0 out 
there.

To sum up, I think Bazaar is great, and could be released as 1.0
now. However as I outlined before there are some of known bugs
that could get in some peoples way, and I would try and discourage
responding to comments with a suggestion to try packs.

This is not meant to be a rant against packs themselves, they're
great and will really make a difference.

Thanks,

James




More information about the bazaar mailing list