Brief article on benchmarks of Python repository with leading DVCSen

[Nicholas Allen]

> In our context, telling people where to branch is not acceptable.  The
> people who want a DVCS badly will do anything you tell them to.  The
> people who are pretty much satisfied with Subversion refuse to
> countenance any unnecessary change, and will quite likely oppose the
> move if they have to reorganize their workspaces.
>   
Are you implying that branching into your home directory would be too 
much of a restriction imposed by Bazaar? One command needs to be entered 
once in a developer's lifetime on a given machine and then as long as 
they branch to a directory anywhere below their home directory they will 
have no performance problems when branching. Is that really such a 
change from what they do with subversion? Do they commonly checkout code 
outside of their home directory? It's not like they wouldn't still be 
able to do this either it's just that Bazaar will try to download the 
revisions again. I find it hard to imagine this to be any problem or 
change from existing work flow.

>  > 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.
>
> The Python developers have *no interest whatsoever* in a "fair"
> comparison.  They want a comparison in workflows that have the
> absolute minimum differences from their current workflows. 
I think a fair comparison would not change their current workflow if 
home directory is initialized as a shared repository.