Re: Locks on the Bzr repository

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:24:49 -0400
> Cc: u.s.reddy@cs.bham.ac.uk, monnier@iro.umontreal.ca, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Reply-To: rms@gnu.org
> 
>     If Bazaar is a "gnu project", can FSF lean on them to produce a
>     proper integrated rebase?
> 
> I can try -- but first I need a clear and self-contained description
> of the problem.  Is the problem solely one of occasional unpredictable
> failures?

No.  The problem is that the SFTP protocol we use to access the
repository on Savannah needs a very high network throughput to be
reasonably fast.  When I work on fencepost.gnu.org (a rare situation
these days), it takes between 5 and 30 seconds to either update the
tree from the master repository or commit a set of changes, which is
reasonably fast.  But when I'm doing that from home, where I have a
3.5Mb link, it takes 3 to 5 _minutes_, which is terribly slow for such
a fast link.  The occasional failures due to locks are on top of that;
coupled with the generally very slow operation, it makes the situation
just barely bearable.

Others had even worse experiences.  For example, Jason reported that a
commit of a few lines worth of changes took around 30 minutes.

We are told that switching to the bzr+ssh protocol should make things
much better.  So making this switch is the highest priority now, I
think.  If that is not good enough, either, we could take it up with
the Bazaar maintainers, but as long as we use SFTP, they continue to
claim that the protocol is to blame for the slow operation.

See the on-going discussion re: "Setting up bzr+ssh on Savannah" on
savannah-hackers-public mailing list for similar problems experienced
by other GNU projects that use bzr.  Some of the package maintainers
recently threatened in that discussion to take their repositories
elsewhere or switch to some other VCS, because bzr support on Savannah
seems to be abysmally inadequate.