'branches' questions.

[Jelmer Vernooij]

Hi,

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 04:27:43PM -0700, Bosco Rama wrote:
> The first thing we noticed is that 'bzr branches repo' doesn't return
> the top-level branches as we expected.  Maybe we misunderstand what the
> command is meant to do.
That's correct - 'bzr branches' lists the sibling branches of a
control directory. The repo directory in your case doesn't have any
sibling branches.

> We've also come up against a performance issue with the 'branches' command
> when run over SSH remotely.  We tested within the dir, ssh to localhost
> and from a remote site.  Here are the timings (averaged over 3 runnings):

> It seems like a rather large factor increase for what we thought would
> be a relatively low consumption operation.  We can only assume that the
> command is actually transferring structural data of some sort instead of
> having the server-side perform the operation and return the results.  It
> also seems to adversely affect qbzr.  Is there anything we can do on our
> end to speed this operation up?
Yes, that's indeed what's happening. There is no dedicated smart
server command for recursively finding branches, so bzr is doing a lot
of low-level operations over the SSH connection.

I'm not sure if there is much you can do to improve this, other than
implementing a custom HPSS command for 'bzr branches -R'. Another
option of course is to simply run 'ssh remotehost bzr branches -R /path'.

Cheers,

Jelmer