Excessive network traffic for pulling a small change

[Colin D Bennett]

The GRUB project has recently switched from Subversion to Bazaar.  It
has been working great in general; however one user has expressed a
concern for the amount of network traffic transferred for pulling a
small change.

I don't know the details of this user's situation yet, such as the
protocol (http, sftp, or bzr+ssh), but I suspect it is either http or
possibly sftp.

I know that if you are pushing changes *to* a branch over sftp, you can
sometimes trigger an automatic repack, resulting in tremendous amounts
of network traffic, but for pulling a small change, I can't think of a
good reason that 3 MB of data had to be transferred for this small
patch.

GRUB's Bazaar hosting is on the Savannah.gnu.org server.  See
<https://savannah.gnu.org/bzr/?group=grub> for VCS info.

Trunk via HTTP: <http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/r/grub>.

Of course it would be nice if a smart server could be used instead of
vanilla SFTP for developers, but that's apparently not supported by
Savannah at present. Would a read-only smart server be required for
efficient read-only access too?

What could cause 3 MB of data transfer for this small change?
Does anyone have a suggestion for this user of a low-bandwidth
connection?  Thanks.

Regards,
Colin


Begin forwarded message:

Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:50:58 +0530
From: "KESHAV P.R." <skodabenz at gmail.com>
To: grub-devel <grub-devel at gnu.org>
Subject: GIT mirror of BZR repo


Is it possible to update the GIT repo git://repo.or.cz/grub2.git to be
in sync with BZR repo. Since grub2 changed from svn to bzr it has not
been updated. BZR is very, very slow to update. It downloads about 3
MB for very few changes.

These are the changes that bzr did, for which it downloaded 3 MB of
data (for what?).

[keshav at keshav-laptop grub2_BZR]$ bzr diff -r2249..2250
=== modified file 'ChangeLog'
--- ChangeLog	2010-03-06 20:49:59 +0000
+++ ChangeLog	2010-03-07 22:02:13 +0000
@@ -1,3 +1,7 @@
+2010-03-07  Vladimir Serbinenko  <phcoder at gmail.com>
+
+	* genmoddep.awk: Output all missing symbols and not only first.
+
 2010-03-06  Vladimir Serbinenko  <phcoder at gmail.com>

 	* NEWS: Put the date of 1.98 release.

=== modified file 'genmoddep.awk'
--- genmoddep.awk	2009-11-21 16:33:52 +0000
+++ genmoddep.awk	2010-03-07 22:02:13 +0000
@@ -32,13 +32,12 @@
   else if ($1 != "__gnu_local_gp") {
     printf "%s in %s is not defined\n", $1, module >"/dev/stderr";
     error++;
-    exit;
   }
 }

 # Output the result.
 END {
-  if (error == 1)
+  if (error >= 1)
     exit 1;

   for (mod in modtab) {

[keshav at keshav-laptop grub2_BZR]$

I connect to net using GPRS and I get only about 3-5 kbps speed. It
took 20 mins to just update from rev 2249 to 2250. What exactly is bzr
downloading for such a small patch? I used "bzr pull" . Git is much
faster, it wouldn't take 30 seconds for git to update download and
update the above patch if grub2 was git repo. I request you guys to
re-enable the above mentioned git repo, or tell me some way to make
bzr faster like git (for GPRS speeds). Thank you.

May be helpful :- http://github.com/kfish/git-bzr


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