Bazaar-NG Traffic #3 Prerelease

[James Blackwell]

Ok guys. Here's the Bazaar Traffic #3 prerelease. This file covers the
summary of events on the mailing list traffic from approximately 03
October to 11 October. 

This time I managed to squash 307 posts down to a paltry 220 lines.

Without any further ado: 


= Traffic Notes =
This traffic covers the Bazaar-NG mailing list traffic from 03 October
until approximately 11 October. Within this document you will find a
variety of things: bug fixes, releases, timings and most importantly the
tireless efforts of over a dozen people into a paltry 221 lines. Enjoy!

= Executable flagging patch =
The executable flagging patch was taking this week. The conversation, which
gently spread open with a short discussion about an optimization that was
causing a bug in the implementation, blossomed into a rehash about whether
to track just the executable bit or not. The end result was the same plan
as originally; namely that only the three executable bits would be
preserved. The thread closed off with Robert Collins announcing a merge of
the final version.

In a later post Gustavo Niemeyer updated the executable flagging so that a
conflict on merging permissions was impossible. Good work

= bzr init dirname=
John Meinel pinged the list asking if anybody was planning on merging a
fix for 'bzr init dirname'. The name or location of the merge he was
referring to didn't seem to be available.

= Don't display logs from merges =
The thread about whether to have "bzr log" dive into merged logs continued
this week. Collins reported to Gustavo Niemeyer that his patch for logs no
longer applied because of new code. After the fix bounced betwixt the two
for a bit, a patch that everyone liked went in. 

= Hiding trailing newlines in commit messages =
Last week Alexander Belchenko supplied a patch that hides the display of
extraneous newlines in commit messages. Martin Pool seemed to be a bit
ambivalent about the patch and requested for other opinions. Though the
general consensus is positive, the list does not mention whether it was
accepted or rejected.

= New svn2bzr tool (cont) =
Last week Niemeyer announced the release of a new svn2bzr. This week, 
Jelmer Vernooij reported that svn2bzr took quite a while to run. Niemeyer
asked for Vernooij for more information and provided some pointers on how
to speed things up a little bit. Niemeyer also suggested avoiding
compressed svn dumps.

= Output for missing =
A thread reminiscent of the log display thread showed up entitled "star or
parallele merge"(sic) started up that this week. As with the other thread,
the pivotal question is 'should information for merges from third parties
be displayed or hidden'. The final decision was to hide merges from third
parties.


= Merge is not a solved problem =
Under the same title as the previous thread, a new conversation started up
about the unpredictability of merge. Though several people contributed
constructively to this thread, the most memorable part was written by David
Allouche: 

   The bottom line is that, in my understanding, merging is largely
   an unsolved problem with nasty yet relatively common edge cases,
   so good diagnostic facilities are required.

After a little back and forth, Aaron Bentley hit the nail on the head with
the following comment:
    
    Three-way also has silent failures there.  We gotta use something.
    What do you suggest?

= Coding Standards =
The "Re: Nomenclature" thread finished up this week. The developers agreed
upon coding guidelines for variable names and such. If you hack on Bzr,
please consider this thread against any patches that you may submit.

= Uni-coding for newformat =
A thread opened up about unicoding filenames for inventories. There's not
much here for endusers, but if you like encoding pesky filenames, then this
thread should be your cup of tea. You can find it under "Re: newformat
format change"

In another thread that later became moot, named "[BUG] bogus name_version
in bzr.newformat", John Meinel noted that the information for a file was
being updated unnecessarily. 

= Using SQLite with Bazaar-NG =
John Meinel hacked up Bazaar-NG this week to use SQLite and reported
impressive numbers for conversions (from what?). Though he stopped short of
advocating using SQLite, he did report that conversions went from 10
minutes down to 30 seconds. Martin Pool, in replying to a post that yours
truly didn't receive, suggested that Bazaar-NG could see notable
improvements over the 5:1 history-to-code storage that Bazaar-NG had at the
time of the post.

Though the thread petered out this particular time, don't be surprised if
this doesn't come up again.

= Xtla to use Pymacs to support Bazaar-NG =
Matthieu Moy reported to the list that he was was planning to provide
Bazaar-NG support for Xtla (Xtla is an emacs module that provides support
for tla and Bazaar 1.x). Prior to getting started, Moy asked the list for
opinions on whether pymacs would be a good choice, which the list
wholeheartedly agreed with. The thread finished up with Martin Pool
reaffirming that he was very interested in supporting the use of Bazaar-NG
in a library context.

= Bazaar-NG may depend upon twisted = 
Robert Collins was ecstatic that the transports code had been merged into
Bazaar-NG and happily offered to work upon the network support. He offered
to port an old proof of concept to the new format. The catch was that the
code depended upon twisted. Surprisingly, the only person that spoke up was
John Meinel, who agreed.

= Cleaning up bzr ignore output =
Michael Ellerman, who addressed the list as "Bazaaristas", opinioned that
the output from bzr ignore was more confusing than necessary. Ellerman put
his money where his mouth was at in a time honored way: By providing a
patch to fix his itch. The thread ended up one person suggesting the help
should be improved and another person suggesting that Ellerman's assessment
was correct. The thread seemed to end without common agreement.

= Ghosts in Bazaar-NG just in time for Halloween =
Martin Pool announced that the Bazaar-NG upgrade command now converts
missing revisions to "ghost" revisions. The thread then quickly turned into
a discussion about supporting the pre-newformat compressed revisions.

= Bzr in server mode =
In a foreshadowing move, John Meinel announced a plugin for Bazaar-NG that
keeps a copy of Bazaar-NG running all the time. One accesses this running
copy of NG by running a much smaller program written in C that connects to
the server plugin which performs commands on behalf of the smaller
frontend. The timings, good on a newer machine, were likely to be quite
useful for slower machines. The conversation then moved to suggestions for
the plugin such as possibly using sockets.

= Weave tests =
John Meinel apparently owns the Bazaar-NG world when it comes to
performance testing. This time Meinel compared the time for weave. Though
weave timing was susceptible to the size of the change, generally speaking
the time to weave was O(n), where n is the number of lines in the weave.
Not quite satisfied with himself, he then took the extra step of graphing
his results at http://bzr.arbash-meinel.com/other/RevisionInsertTime.png

In a later thread, Meinel compared the Bazaar-NG weave format against CSSC.
Though Bazaar-NG wins handily, Martin Pool reported that this "is probably
fain praise; tridge reports that some of the [cssc] code is very inefficient"

= Prefixed Stores =
Gustavo Niemeyer supplied a patch to break the three stores into
subdirectories. By using "the lower 8 bits of an adler32 checksum on the
fileid", he breaks the store up into smaller chunks, which Robert Collins
later merged. This patch makes it theoretically possible for Bazaar-NG to
support very busy, very long lived branches such as python on filesystems
such as ext3.

= Compacting Weave files =
Realizing the the length of weave files mattered, Meinel continued work on
his bzr-sax branch. He was successful in cutting down the size of weaves
down quite a bit by being more selective on storing attribute changes. He
was able to shave down the bzr.newformat branch from 2.6 megabytes down to
1.4.

= Bug in commit =
Michael Ellerman reported that bzr commit had a bug that involved trying to
commit a file that was in a subdirectory that was added but not committed.
Robert Collins came to the rescue with a fix.

= Tabs in commit messages=
Alexander Belchenko accidentally used a tab in a commit message and found a
bug in Bazaar-NG. Harald Meland worked up a fix for it but had difficulties
getting it submitted via Robert Collins because of a format incompatibility. 
At the end of the thread Harald provided a traceback for assistance, which
didn't make it in time for this traffic.

= Bug in adding then reverting a file =
In a problem that wasn't resolved by the end of bzr traffic 3, Mark
Rosenstand indicated that Bazaar-NG was eating data for files that had been
added but not yet committed if the revert command was run. Over several
iterations, a fix was suggested, only to be replaced by a more accurate
fix. 

= Bzr 0.1rc1 available =
(note: as of this writing, 0.1.1 or later is already out)

In an amusing turn of events, the mailserver for the ISP that Robert
Collins used decided that gnupg signatures were a virus. 

Martin Pool was kind enough to post on his behalf the url for the download
and a quick description of the release (new faster format and a couple
minor bugs that needed to be fixed before 0.1)

= Ubuntu Below Zero =
Martin Pool announced Ubuntu Below Zero. This is a hackers meet for people
that like to work. More details are available at
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBelowZero

= Aaron Bentley's branches moved =
Aaron Bentley moved his branches into a subdirectory. They can now be found
under http://panoramicfeedback.com/opensource/bzr/

= Cleared up progress bar =
Dan Loda provided a fix for the confusing output after attempting a merge.
Aaron Bentley already had a fix, which Robert Collins took.

= Goodbye, Gustavo =
Gustavo sadly announced that he would no longer be working on Bazaar-NG
full time. His frequent contributions will certainly missed. 

As a goodbye present, Niemeyer provided a patch for symbolic tags for
Bazaar-NG, which Robert Collins merged in.

= Bzr log more useful =
David Allouche provided a patch which shows the arguments and the current
working directory of Bazaar-NG. Martin Pool thanked him and merged it.

In a sign of more good things to come, he then went to submit a merge
request for test case fixes. Robert Collins asked for for a few changes,
which David has just completed.

= Bzrweb is back =
Chris McCormick announced that bzrweb is back online! At the time of this
traffic bzrweb worked with 0.0.9, but not 0.1rc1.

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