Brief article on benchmarks of Python repository with leading DVCSen

[Paul Moore]

2009/2/11 Nicholas Allen <nicholas.allen at ableton.com>:
> I mean all they have to do is *one* extra command (not even for each branch
> but just once per project):
>
> bzr init-repo my-branches
>
> Then they just have to branch all there branches below that directory.

A purely personal comment - it's this second part that's the issue.
Bazaar is dictating my directory structure, and that's what I dislike.

> It sounds to me like people are being completely unreasonable here.

Actually, it sounds like the Bazaar proponents are repeatedly
misunderstanding the issue. That's OK, as long as you're not asking me
to change, if Bazaar suits you then there's no problem. Equally, if
the Bazaar developers are happy that the trade-offs make sense then
that's fine - not every tool can suit every user. But there *is* a
genuine conflict here.

> A fair benchmark would have been much more interesting IMHO. I expect Bazaar would
> have still be the slowest but it would at least be a reasonable and fair comparison.

I don't want to get into benchmarking, but as a genuine use case, I
recently said I'd provide a small patch for Python. I used Mercurial,
and all I did was go to my "random junk" directory, do hg clone
http://,,,python... python-patch, cd python-patch, hack, then create &
upload the patch to the tracker.

For Bazaar, I believe I'd need to add the steps
bzr init-repo python-repo
(do some fiddling to download and populate this repo with a pre-build tarball)
(bzr pull the rest of the data from since the tarball was made)
bzr branch python-patch
... etc much as before

I don't know if the steps in parentheses are still needed, but they
certainly were, if you wanted to avoid extremely slow initial clone
times, at one point (and I haven't seen anything saying that's changed
- nope, I went and checked, it's still true that this is the
documented approach).

That's certainly much more complex (not just "one command") - for a
one-off exercise where I intend to delete the whole lot after my patch
is accepted.

Paul.