Some bzr newbie comments (somewhat long)

[Jens Lund]

John A Meinel <john <at> arbash-meinel.com> writes:
> Jens Lund wrote:
> Actually, if you have Ubuntu 5.10 there is an older version (0.6) in one
> of the apt repositories. You might have to go to 'Universe', I don't
> remember where it was.

The version in Universe was 0.1.1, so I decided to install the newer version 
by hand.

> > Performance of "bzr branch http://bazaar-ng.org/bzr/bzr.dev" is very, very 
> > poor.
> We are working on several ways to speed up http connections. (using
> pycurl, changing file formats, etc). One thing that you are running
> into, is that you are actually CPU limited.

Ahaa, I didn't realize that different transports had quite different CPU 
requirements.

> > User interface for rename, move, mv:
> We have actually discussed this very point. I can give you the
> differences (rename will only change a name, it won't move a file to a
> new directory, move will only move to a new directory, it won't change
> the name, and mv will do either depending on what seems to make sense).
> 
> I do think we are switching to just having the 'mv' command.

Sounds like the right thing to do. Note, that currently the "bzr help rename" 
give an example of moving a file to a different directory. (If the example 
tries to rename a directory I think the actual file name in that directory 
should not be present.)

> > Wiki/website: there is a lot of usefull information there, but it feels 
> > somewhat unorganized. I would e.g. at some stage suggest to integrate 
> > BzrRevisionSpec into the tutorial (which is now in the tree, I know) such 
> > that it by time will grow into a real manual. Also, some more detailed 
> > information on the internals of how bzr works (revids, inventory, hashes, 
> > etc.) will be nice: again a lot of information seem to be available in the 
> > doc/ directory, but it is not clearly organized and it is not clear what 
is 
> > ideas and what has been implemented.
> 
> Thank you for pointing out some documentation deficiencies. James, since
> you seem to be are documentation guru, can you at least mark some places
> where this information should be fleshed out?

A couple of suggestions for the Wiki:

* http://bazaar.canonical.com/, Bazaar-ng menu on the right lists 
Installation, Introduction, Features, etc. as sub-bullets of Documentation, 
even though the sub-bullets are not necessarily part of the Documentation 
entry. I would have expected to find all these sub-bullets on 
http://bazaar.canonical.com/BzrDocumentation as well and the points on 
http://bazaar.canonical.com/ to just being shortcuts.

* Several pages seem to make reference to downloading/installing the software:
- http://bazaar.canonical.com/BzrInstallation (link from 
http://bazaar.canonical.com/)
- http://bazaar.canonical.com/DownloadBzr (link from 
http://bazaar.canonical.com/. Contains the not working link to BzrWeb.)
- http://bazaar.canonical.com/BzrPlugins
- http://bazaar.canonical.com/BzrUsefulTools
- http://bazaar.canonical.com/BzrTools
- http://bazaar.canonical.com/BzrBranches (to some extend)
- http://bazaar.canonical.com/WebInterface (now I can't find what pages link 
to this page...)
These pages are linked from several pages. It would be nice to have them 
cleaned up into a more hieracical structure: an overview page containing 
pointers to "download and install bzr (and prerequirements)", "other bzr 
branches", "webinterfaces", etc. Perhaps also some of the tools/plugins will 
by time be integrated into bzr proper :-?

* A lot of pages are present on development ideas. This is great, but I think 
it would be even greater if e.g. http://bazaar.canonical.com/BzrDevelopment 
(linked from the Wiki frontpage) contained a collection of pointers to *all* 
these pages and the mailing archieves (stating that they are a great resource 
for following the ideas with bzr).

I do however realize that maintaing the Wiki is probably not top priority over 
actual code work (and I do not think it should either!), but anyway I hope 
these inputs will be of inspiration.

Jens