Re: Locks on the Bzr repository

[Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org>]

  On 19/8/2010 11:40 PM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> A couple times now, I've had the following kind of message when trying
> to commit:
>
> Unable to obtain lock sftp://bzr.sv.gnu.org/srv/bzr/emacs/trunk/.bzr/branch/lock
> held by jasonr@gnu.org on host wanchan [process #23356]
> locked 28 minutes, 51 seconds ago
>
> The first time I thought it was a stale lock so I broke it, but then it
> came right back, so I suspect it might be due to something else.
> Could it be that bzr grabs the lock when you do "bzr commit" and keep it
> held for as long as you're editing the commit message?

I don't think editing the commit message is the problem, but the fact 
that to do anything with the master repository involves downloading 
and/or uploading at least 4MB of data, on a connection which fluctuates 
between 0 and 100kb/s, mostly in the 6 - 20kb/s range.

> If that's indeed the culprit, I think it's a misfeature of Bzr, but at
> least we can workaround it by using "bzr commit -m<...>", which I would
> then *strongly* recommend.

I think the misfeature is that we are still using sftp access, which 
might be OK for users in well connected parts of the world like US, 
Europe and Japan, but from here is unusably slow.