RFC: startup time - again

[David Cournapeau]

Adrian Wilkins wrote:
>
>
> Competing with git on raw performance is daft. 

Not competing with git would be daft. They play in the same space: open
source DVCS. If bzr is not a competitor, it will not be sustainable IMO.
Git is already much strong than bzr because it has so much more
traction. Being slower is OK. Being slower to the point it is unusable
for most highly visible projects is not. For example, the emacs
conversion seemed  like a fiasco to me, and the main reason was because
bzr was (and still is) way too slow. Open solaris, the JDK chose hg
instead of bzr because bzr was too slow.

> The design of git was
> optimized to be good at merging a very large number of kernel patches,
> because that's what Linus does. Other considerations in it's design were
> secondary, and it shows. My userbase would never have grokked the
> default porcelain in git, so for them, git would have been a lot slower
> than Bazaar.

The 'git is fast for merging and that's it' is terribly outdated. git
made much more progress in the UI than bzr did in performances in the
last two years.

Don't get me wrong, I like bzr very much, that's the fist VCS I actually
understand (I found svn too complicated for my own projects, bzr made
much more sense in comparison). But bzr is just too slow for so many
things, in particular history and network. Today, the main reason why I
still use bzr is launchpad. When git will have reasonable options for
bug tracking/project management, if bzr is still order of magnitude
slower than git, I know for sure that I won't stay with bzr.

cheers,

David