Bazaar still below the radar when evaluating VCS tools

[Óscar Fuentes]

Roland Mas <lolando at debian.org> writes:

> 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.
>
> On the 2a repository I use for FusionForge (~9000 revisions, 72 MB
> freshly packed), bzr check takes two hours.

`bzr check' on the Emacs trunk branch (almost 100,000 revisions) takes
two *days*.

I agree on everything you say. Possibly bzr is fast enough for not being
a nuisance on most cases, but sometimes it feels a bit unresponsive. For
instance, when reverting a file from Emacs, the editor opens a buffer (a
window for you non-Emacsers) and executes `bzr diff <file>'
asynchronously directing the output to the buffer, so the user can see
what changes he is going to throw away. At the same time it asks for
confirmation for the operation. Well, everytime, when I just finished
answering the confirmation request (which means to type "yes[ENTER]")
`bzr diff' is not done yet, which makes Emacs ask if it must kill the
process. This is annoying.

Other day-to-day operations that feels slow are `pull' (pulling from
lp0:emacs via the bzr+ssh protocol usally requires more than 20 seconds
over a 600 KB/s ADSL line), `merge', which makes you wait a bit, `log'
for a given file or directory, and `annotate', but at least here you can
say that it is faster than git, although they will retort saying that
git users have other ways to achieve what you usually want from
`annotate'. Oh, yeah, whatever.

[snip]

>   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.

So true.