Handling of "partial fixes" and bug numbers

[John Arbash Meinel]

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I'm wondering what the policy should be for bug fixes that don't go the
whole way to fix a bug, but at least improve things.

Specifically, we have:
  https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/bzr/+bug/109114
  [master] bzr holds whole files in memory; raises MemoryError on large
files

Which is talking about being able to insert content into the repository
without having to hold the whole thing in memory.

I'm finishing up and submitting:
  lp:~jameinel/bzr/1.16-commit-fulltext

It doesn't get rid of "hold whole file in memory", but it *does* drop
the peak memory consumption from about 5x the size of the largest file,
down to 2x (for --2a, ~3x for --pack) the size.

We don't really have a bug for "Uses more than 1x the size" during commit.

What I ended up doing was just marking that there was a related branch
(which will soon be marked as [merged]), and in the NEWS entry I did:

> +* Reduced memory consumption during ``bzr commit`` of large files. For
> +  pre 2a formats, should be down to ~3x the size of a file, and for
> +  ``--2a`` formats should be down to exactly 2x the size. Related to bug
> +  #109114. (John Arbash Meinel)
> +


(So I used "Related to" rather than (..., #109114).)

There are other options, though.

1) Introduce a new bug report, that says we hold > 1x the size of a file
when committing. And then mark that as related to 109114, but then mark
the new bug as Fix Released.

2) Close the existing bug, and then re-open it with the fact that we
still hold 1x rather than doing something like using a File interface,
or Robert's ideas of fragmenting.


Anyway, I don't have great ideas. It just seems a shame that committing
something which *improves* the state of a bug can't actually mark it as
Fix Released, because it hasn't actually achieved the ultimate goals of
that bug. (1) is possible, but it seems a bit "hey look at me" to open a
bug just so that you can mark it fixed.

John
=:->

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