Bazaar still below the radar when evaluating VCS tools

[Teemu Likonen]

* 2010-02-26 22:25 (+0100), Roland Mas wrote:

> 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.

> 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.

My current use of Bzr is just pull/log/diff in the Emacs repository.
Besides "bzr pull" I often notice delays with log commands:

    $ time bzr log -l10 -n0 >/dev/null

    real    0m8.103s
    user    0m7.788s
    sys     0m0.268s

When the nearly-official Git mirror is up-to-date enough I use it
instead:

    $ time git log -10 >/dev/null

    real    0m0.007s
    user    0m0.004s
    sys     0m0.004s

Eight seconds is not unusably slow for me but I think everyone prefers
0.007 seconds to 8.1 seconds (both numbers are with warm cache).

Obviously not all branches and repositories are like Emacs' but I
believe that speed is still an important factor when evaluating whether
a VCS tool is "below [or above] the radar".