Re: What have the Romans done for us? (Bazaar)

[Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com>]

Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:
>Would somebody please remind me of all the advantages Bazaar has over
>CVS, all the wonderful things it enables one to do.
>
>Right at the moment, it just seems like a slow, slow, slow and buggy
>replacement for CVS, which consumes several hundred megabytes of my disk
>space more than CVS did.  

If you don't typically have multiple different branches going at once,
then there is no space advantage to Bzr.  (On the other hand, for some
people there are advantages to having all the history locally, though
those may not be advantages for you.)

>There doesn't seem to be a bzr equivalent of
>http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewcv;

There is; it's called loggerhead.  But it's broken on Savannah right
now.  See https://savannah.gnu.org/support/index.php?107142.

> bzr log is so slow (40 seconds) as
>to be only somewhat useful.  

Hmm.  On my 4-year-old IBM ThinkPad R60 running Debian GNU/Linux:

  $ time bzr log -n0 --show-ids > log-n0.out
  real    0m25.147s
  user    0m23.173s
  sys     0m1.540s
  $ 

That's for the entire history of the project.  I don't have a CVS tree
handy to test with, but my memory is CVS was not faster at that
operation -- though of course, CVS had to go over the network, so it's
hard to compare, really.  What exact log operations are slow for you vs
the comparable CVS operations?  (A non-rhetorical question, by the way.
I believe you when you say it's slow, I just want to narrow down what
"it" is.)

> Even updating one's repository takes many
>minutes, something which took only a few seconds with CVS.

Yes.  But remember: https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?107077
(which is actively being worked on).

>Worst of all is the lack of a proper fine manual; what there is is
>available only in html or "bzr help", neither of which is properly
>searchable; what there is is also bloated and vague and generally of
>low quality.

?  http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/en/ points to plenty of downloadable
documentation, in HTML, CHM, and PDF formats.

>At Stefan's suggestion, I tried
>
>  $ bzr diff -r tag:EMACS_23_1 lisp/progmodes/cc-*.el
>
>.  This crashes bzr.  I've just updated to the latest version of bzr
>(2.1.0), and it still crashes.  So keen are bzr's developers to get
>decent bug reports that they make you register (on "launchpad") before
>they'll deign to permit you to submit one.  They insist on you
>submitting this bug report via a script running in a web-browser.  That
>script fails on my machine, so I'm stuffed.  Anybody know a mail address
>to get in touch with the bazaar team?

Sure: <bazaar {_AT_} lists.ubuntu.com>

I report bzr bugs at https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/bzr/+filebug (well,
I navigate my way there from the Bazaar project home page, but that's
the page I'm aiming for).  I don't use any "script running in a
web-browser"; not sure what you're referring to.

IMHO it's fine to just describe your bug on that mailing list.

>So, yes, bzr is wonderful, because it's a DISTRIBUTED VCS, and
>distributed VCSs are Good Things.  Would somebody please remind me why?

Well, if you don't like doing the new things that DVCS allows you to do,
then yeah, there aren't any advantages :-).  For those who like having
all history locally, being able to make and merge task branches, being
able to easily push fully-versioned trees to other places, etc, it's
much better.  I personally would never want to go back.  (I also like
the truly atomic commits with unambiguous identifying handles, though
that isn't specific to DVCS of course.)

But I can certainly see how there are some developers for whom these
things are not a step forward.

(Also, some of us like the better sanitation and medicine and education
and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and
baths and public order...)

-Karl