Windows-specific questions about Bazaar

Windows-specific questions about Bazaar

[Eli Zaretskii]

If someone has experience in using Bazaar on MS-Windows, could you
please answer the following questions:

 . The Reference Guide says: "On Windows auto-detection of Putty's
   plink.exe is disabled. Default SSH client for Windows is
   paramiko. User still can force usage of plink if explicitly set
   environment variable BZR_SSH=plink."  Any advice whether to stick
   to the default or force usage of plink?  (One obvious, but minor
   disadvantage of not using plink is that you will have two places
   where each public key and machine signatures are saved.)

 . CVS was notorious for problems when the time zone switches from
   Standard Time to DST and back, even though modern Windows systems
   and NTFS store times and file time stamps in UTC.  Typically,
   unless you did something special, the first "cvs up" after the
   switch would send the entire sandbox upstream.  (I even wrote a
   program that moved all time stamps an hour forward or back to avoid
   that.)  Does Bazaar cope correctly with this, assuming the
   time-zone information is set correctly in the Registry?

 . Does Bazaar honor $HOME on Windows, or is $BZR_HOME the only
   variable it looks at, before falling back on the default location?

TIA

Re: Windows-specific questions about Bazaar

[Lennart Borgman]

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 8:15 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> If someone has experience in using Bazaar on MS-Windows, could you
> please answer the following questions:
>
>  . The Reference Guide says: "On Windows auto-detection of Putty's
>   plink.exe is disabled. Default SSH client for Windows is
>   paramiko. User still can force usage of plink if explicitly set
>   environment variable BZR_SSH=plink."  Any advice whether to stick
>   to the default or force usage of plink?  (One obvious, but minor
>   disadvantage of not using plink is that you will have two places
>   where each public key and machine signatures are saved.)


I do not know much about this but I am using bzr under Windows to
reach Launchpad.

I actually use pageant.exe that came with plink and putty to login to
Launchpad for bzr. However I am obviously not using plink. Or I do not
believe so. BZR_SSH is not set and plink is not in PATH.

However it works.


>  . CVS was notorious for problems when the time zone switches from
>   Standard Time to DST and back, even though modern Windows systems
>   and NTFS store times and file time stamps in UTC.  Typically,
>   unless you did something special, the first "cvs up" after the
>   switch would send the entire sandbox upstream.  (I even wrote a
>   program that moved all time stamps an hour forward or back to avoid
>   that.)  Does Bazaar cope correctly with this, assuming the
>   time-zone information is set correctly in the Registry?
>
>  . Does Bazaar honor $HOME on Windows, or is $BZR_HOME the only
>   variable it looks at, before falling back on the default location?
>
> TIA

Re: Windows-specific questions about Bazaar

[David Robinow]

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 2:15 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>  . Does Bazaar honor $HOME on Windows, or is $BZR_HOME the only
>   variable it looks at, before falling back on the default location?
 It appears to check BZR_HOME, APPDATA, and HOME in that order.
I don't think deleting APPDATA is a good idea, so the check for HOME
isn't really useful.

See config_dir()  in bzrlib/config.py  in bzr-2.0.2

There's similar code in win32utils.py for locating the log file.

[Note the TODO in config_dir() ]

Re: Windows-specific questions about Bazaar

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2009 14:56:13 -0500
> From: David Robinow <drobinow@gmail.com>
> 
> On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 2:15 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> >  . Does Bazaar honor $HOME on Windows, or is $BZR_HOME the only
> >   variable it looks at, before falling back on the default location?
>  It appears to check BZR_HOME, APPDATA, and HOME in that order.
> I don't think deleting APPDATA is a good idea, so the check for HOME
> isn't really useful.

Thanks.

Re: Windows-specific questions about Bazaar

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2009 20:29:24 +0100
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> I actually use pageant.exe that came with plink and putty to login to
> Launchpad for bzr. However I am obviously not using plink. Or I do not
> believe so. BZR_SSH is not set and plink is not in PATH.
> 
> However it works.

Sure, it works; I didn't want to imply it doesn't I think the default
SSH client (paramiko, whatever that is) uses pageant for
authentication, but plink is not used unless BZR_SSH is set.

Re: Windows-specific questions about Bazaar

[Stefan Monnier]

>  . CVS was notorious for problems when the time zone switches from
>    Standard Time to DST and back, even though modern Windows systems
>    and NTFS store times and file time stamps in UTC.  Typically,
>    unless you did something special, the first "cvs up" after the
>    switch would send the entire sandbox upstream.  (I even wrote a
>    program that moved all time stamps an hour forward or back to avoid
>    that.)  Does Bazaar cope correctly with this, assuming the
>    time-zone information is set correctly in the Registry?

AFAIK, bzr does not use time-stamps in a semantics-significant way.
So at most you may notice a slight performance hit when the time changes
because Bzr ends up scanning more files than strictly needed.
But it won't change the data sent over the network, AFAIK.


        Stefan

Re: Windows-specific questions about Bazaar

[Alexander Belchenko]

Eli Zaretskii пишет:
>> From: Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>
>> Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2009 20:29:24 +0100
>> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>>
>> I actually use pageant.exe that came with plink and putty to login to
>> Launchpad for bzr. However I am obviously not using plink. Or I do not
>> believe so. BZR_SSH is not set and plink is not in PATH.
>>
>> However it works.
> 
> Sure, it works; I didn't want to imply it doesn't I think the default
> SSH client (paramiko, whatever that is) uses pageant for
> authentication, but plink is not used unless BZR_SSH is set.

I'm not quite understand your last remark.

paramiko library can use password authentication, or SSH keys authentication via pageant,
automatically. Regardless of presence of plink.
So if you're using plink + pageant successfully, you can use bzr + pageant without problems.

Using paramiko on Windows is safe choice.

Re: Windows-specific questions about Bazaar

[Alexander Belchenko]

Stefan Monnier пишет:
>>  . CVS was notorious for problems when the time zone switches from
>>    Standard Time to DST and back, even though modern Windows systems
>>    and NTFS store times and file time stamps in UTC.  Typically,
>>    unless you did something special, the first "cvs up" after the
>>    switch would send the entire sandbox upstream.  (I even wrote a
>>    program that moved all time stamps an hour forward or back to avoid
>>    that.)  Does Bazaar cope correctly with this, assuming the
>>    time-zone information is set correctly in the Registry?
> 
> AFAIK, bzr does not use time-stamps in a semantics-significant way.
> So at most you may notice a slight performance hit when the time changes
> because Bzr ends up scanning more files than strictly needed.
> But it won't change the data sent over the network, AFAIK.

That's correct.

Re: Windows-specific questions about Bazaar

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Alexander Belchenko <bialix@ukr.net>
> Date: Wed, 02 Dec 2009 00:16:52 +0200
> 
> Stefan Monnier пишет:
> >>  . CVS was notorious for problems when the time zone switches from
> >>    Standard Time to DST and back, even though modern Windows systems
> >>    and NTFS store times and file time stamps in UTC.  Typically,
> >>    unless you did something special, the first "cvs up" after the
> >>    switch would send the entire sandbox upstream.  (I even wrote a
> >>    program that moved all time stamps an hour forward or back to avoid
> >>    that.)  Does Bazaar cope correctly with this, assuming the
> >>    time-zone information is set correctly in the Registry?
> > 
> > AFAIK, bzr does not use time-stamps in a semantics-significant way.
> > So at most you may notice a slight performance hit when the time changes
> > because Bzr ends up scanning more files than strictly needed.
> > But it won't change the data sent over the network, AFAIK.
> 
> That's correct.

Thanks.

Re: Windows-specific questions about Bazaar

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Alexander Belchenko <bialix@ukr.net>
> Date: Wed, 02 Dec 2009 00:15:49 +0200
> 
> > Sure, it works; I didn't want to imply it doesn't I think the default
> > SSH client (paramiko, whatever that is) uses pageant for
> > authentication, but plink is not used unless BZR_SSH is set.
> 
> I'm not quite understand your last remark.

There was a period missing there, after "doesn't".  Does that help to
understand it?  I was just telling Lennart how I think it works by
default: uses pageant for authentication, but does not use plink or
psftp for the actual access.

> Using paramiko on Windows is safe choice.

I was asking about relative merits.  Are there any?

Re: Windows-specific questions about Bazaar

[Óscar Fuentes]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

[snip]

Paramiko is an implementation of ssh2 for Python. It makes plink
unnecessary.

>> Using paramiko on Windows is safe choice.
>
> I was asking about relative merits.  Are there any?

AFAIK, both work fine. As paramiko is a Python thing, you have one less
external dependence.

It is probable that bzr+paramiko has more attention from the developers
than bzr+plink too, as paramiko is cross-platform and almost all bzr
developers work on GNU/Linux.

-- 
Óscar

Re: Windows-specific questions about Bazaar

[Alexander Belchenko]

Eli Zaretskii пишет:
>> From: Alexander Belchenko <bialix@ukr.net>
>> Date: Wed, 02 Dec 2009 00:15:49 +0200
>>
>>> Sure, it works; I didn't want to imply it doesn't I think the default
>>> SSH client (paramiko, whatever that is) uses pageant for
>>> authentication, but plink is not used unless BZR_SSH is set.
>> I'm not quite understand your last remark.
> 
> There was a period missing there, after "doesn't".  Does that help to
> understand it?  I was just telling Lennart how I think it works by
> default: uses pageant for authentication, but does not use plink or
> psftp for the actual access.
> 
>> Using paramiko on Windows is safe choice.
> 
> I was asking about relative merits.  Are there any?

Using bzr with plink has proved to have problems in some corner cases, because bzr launch plink as
subprocess and therefore has very little control over it. Paramiko is python library with rich API,
so bzr can have more fine-grained control over it.