2.0 upgrade experiences

[Andrew Cowie]

On Thu, 2009-08-13 at 13:35 +0800, Martin Pool wrote:

> In practice it may be hard to
> determine just what exactly is safe,

Yeah, I figured that.

And, I'll certainly acknowledge that it's the OS's bloody job to get
data to disk when we tell it to, not ours.

Of course, that's why I don't use broken platforms. :) [although Robert
scared the shit out of me a couple weeks ago teaching me what I needed
to be afraid of about ext4]

> ... We'd need
> to check the filesystem type too, and perhaps more.

And versions, and, and, and...

> Also, it doesn't seem that unreasonable to me that rather than even
> try to work out when it is safe, we transiently use a bit more disk
> space that will later be collected.  So I think it's partly a problem
> of communication.

Frankly, the problem is a marketing one.

The meme is out there that Git has a robust file format. Another one is
that Bazaar is dodgy and can't get their formats straight. A third one
is that it's disk usage is stupidly bloated.

I for one trust Bazaar. Far more than I trust my own code. Which is why
I'm here. But that's a technical and emotional decision, and it seems to
do me no good to tell other people this.

So my primary interest is having people stop thinking I'm a freak and
not a team player for using bzr. And to that end, the negative memes
have to be *attacked*, with not just better console messages but with
everything and anything you can think of. I was very pissed off during
the GNOME discussion that the bulk of the Bazaar aficionados were "well,
I prefer bzr, but I'm not going to rock to boat." so they now use git.
God help them.

[All in all this is ok, though, because I'm looking forward to helping
them upgrade from Git to Bazaar in a year or two. :)]

> In other words the user problem is not so much "help I'm out of disk"
> but "I thought this would shrink it but it grew, wtf?"

Yes, exactly. If the pain of conversion to 2.0 doesn't result in a
smaller `du`, we've failed because no one will believe it is "now
better". If the blog posts are "I upgraded bzr to 2.0 and it got even
fatter", it will *not* be pretty.

> If your machine does crash and record an incoherent filesystem, it's
> probably not going to happen in a nice tidy way, but in a way that
> surprises bzr and makes it error.

And to that end, you gents being as defencive as possible is excellent.
It's really hard to critique that. The marketing problem is,
unfortunately, a big one. It's tough to find technically sound courses
of action that also help on the PR front. And I feel even less potent,
because I'm not a bzr hacker, so can't do anything about [the code]
directly myself. Damn vocal users and their opinions.

AfC
Sydney

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