Bazaar still below the radar when evaluating VCS tools

[Roland Mas]

Parth Malwankar, 2010-02-26 23:27:17 +0530 :

[...]

> One thing I think that has hit bzr is the "its slow" tag. While this
> is no longer the case this tag has stayed.

  Allow me to slightly disagree there.  I'll be the first to admit the
“throughput” performance has increased impressively over time, there are
still places where “slow” is the correct term.  On the 2a repository I
use for FusionForge (~9000 revisions, 72 MB freshly packed), bzr check
takes two hours.

  Also, besides the throughput, there's the start-up time.  It's not
*that* long when you consider it individually: "bzr status" takes 0.8
seconds here, which I can live with when doing only a "bzr status".
When opening several files at once in Emacs, the Bazaar integration glue
in there runs bzr status on every file that I open, with the net result
that "emacs $(ack -l something)" sometimes runs Bazaar repeatedly for a
minute or two before I can edit these files if ack returns several
dozens.  When I want to push several branches to a remote location that
mostly has them already (although in a different directory hierarchy),
my loop doing pushes over the results of "bzr branches" can take several
minutes, even if I did no local commits since the last push.  And so on.

  Bazaar has definitely left the “unusably slow” category, and everyone
involved in that has my most grateful thanks.  But it's still not in the
“fast” category.  “Fast enough for common cases”, yes; unqualified
“fast”, not yet.

Roland.
-- 
Roland Mas

Il vaut mieux insulter une commode Louis XV qu'une armoire à glace.