SCM discussions in the GNOME community

[David Cournapeau]

Andrew Cowie wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-09-11 at 17:08 +0900, David Cournapeau wrote:
>> Can bzr really manage a repository of GNOME's size ?
>
> GNOME is lots and lots (~190, I believe) of individual projects each
> with their own history. Each one would be an individual Bazaar branch.
(sorry for the not on list e-mail, I always forget it).

You're right, I forgot that the GNOME repository had this layout (I must 
have said that I am really not familiar with gnome from a dev point of 
view; just a relatively happy user ); still, some projects are pretty 
big. For example, gimp has something like 20000 revisions with around 15 
000 files (this is taken from svn, removing all the .svn directories). 
But number of files and revision is not my main concern, see below.
>
> A better question might be "can Bazaar handle something with significant
> history, say GTK+ at 18709 revisions?", and I'm sure the answer is yes,
> being an order of magnitude smaller than Mozilla.
I have myself tried bzr on repositories at least as big as gtk, with 
several thousand revisions. My main grip with bzr performances is 
network wise: it takes already something like what, 10 minutes, to 
branch out bzr frommainline for me. And bzr size is by all account 
negligeable compared to gnome: if you want to build basic gnome from 
sources, how long will it take just to get the sources ? One hour ? 5 
hours ? More ? This is the main concern.

My opinion is the following: I think bzr is pretty good (I don't know 
much other DSCS outside arch), but has a pretty bad press performance 
wise (this is totally unscientific, but almost everytime I mentioned bzr 
with respect to some projects I am involved with and know that bzr could 
handle them, this is one of the main concern). My fear is that people 
are advocating bzr for projects where it will not work well, and as such 
increase th bad press problem: having one more blog article bzr is cool 
but cannot handle project foo is worse than no article at all, I think.

So before advocating it, I think it is important to see whether bzr can 
handle a repository the size of gnome: if I want to build core gnome 
from source repository, I need something like 160 packages according to 
jhbuild. Let's say there are 1000 files per package, each with 5000 
revisions for simplification. How long does it take to get the sources 
if they are all under bzr ?

Cheers,

David