Bazaar focus for 2.1 and 2.2

[Martin Pool]

My hypothesis is that we (Canonical's Bazaar team) will get to grips
with UDD better if there is a tighter medium-term focus.

The key question is whether vcs-imports is that thing, or not.

If we do make imports that one important thing then I'll be asking
people not to work on looms, UDD merge support, or nested trees until
they're done.  Nested trees do relate to imports, but I would probably
aim to fix most non-nested-tree import failures before starting on
them.  We will still do some (non-vcs-import) UDD tagged bugs and of
course we will listen to you, but less than if that was our main
focus.  vcs-imports will eat our cake.

vcs-imports are an easy choice because they are something that's
already there but not consistently  working well so it can cause user
disappointment, it's nice to get things finished to a high standard,
they're visible to Canonical's upper management, there is an error
count we can push down to zero, they mesh with build-from-branch
(which is a current headline feature for Launchpad), and high memory
consumption from bzr-git and bzr-svn causes pain to LOSAs.

On the other hand when we did a user survey they were not reported to
be a big pain point, and I'm not getting a clear message from you or
other udd-related people see them as a priority.  I would really like
to build up momentum behind udd and choose a focus that will best help
with that, so I want to be sure vcs-imports at least aren't a bad
choice in that regard.

bzr 2.1 is going to still basically be a performance and bugfix
release, but if we take this tack, more of the fixes from here through
Lucid will be specifically for vcs-imports.  Depending on how that
goes, we'll probably tackle other areas for 2.2.

I'd like to settle it this week so that we can come back in the new
year and get right into it.

So this thread is the chance for any of the UDD stakeholders to have a
say in whether they see some other specific thing as more important
than vcs-imports, or that they don't.  Speak now...

-- 
Martin