usertest on brisbane-core status report

[Ian Clatworthy]

I've spent today trying to getting usertest supporting and
benchmarking the new formats being compared in brisbane-core.
I haven't had a lot of luck so far unfortunately.

I've raised a bug report (https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/bzr/+bug/328962)
for the issue blocking development4, development4-hash16 and
development4-hash255 benchmarking. Perhaps John can take a
look at that?

I also ran into issues with the groupcompress formats.
I've sent a stacktrace off to Robert for the issue blocking
gc-plain (with bzr.dev or brisbane-core) testing. gc-plain-chk
was also failing in a different way yet again, probably related
to the autopack logic around 1000 revisions. I spent some time
trying to track it down without luck. :-(

FWIW, the latest trunk of usertest (rev 139) has the necessary
tweaks to make it easy for anyone to benchmark these formats on
real branches/repositories. Here's the basic recipe ...

Setup:

  cd bzr/repo
  ln -s brisbane-core bzr-dev4plain
  ln -s brisbane-core bzr-dev4h16
  ln -s brisbane-core bzr-dev4h255
  cd ~/bin
  ln -s ~/bzr/repo/bzr-dev4plain/bzr bzr-dev4plain
  ln -s ~/bzr/repo/bzr-dev4h16/bzr bzr-dev4h16
  ln -s ~/bzr/repo/bzr-dev4h255/bzr bzr-devh255

Then, grab a copy of usertest/contrib/bzr-benchmarks and put an
interesting project archive in repos/bzr, e.g. a tar.bz2 of
the bzr 1.12 release (standalone) branch.

To benchmark, cd into bm.common and edit doit.sh to select the
tools of interest (the scripts in ~/bin) and the projects.

If it doesn't work for you, ping me.

Ian C.