Ubuntu Documentation / Bzr

[Steve Alexander]

> As I see them, the advantages that bzr would give us in such a
> workflow would be:
> 
>  * Launchpad integration - easier control of the group of persons who
> can commit to the repository.

Right.  You'd use team membership for that.


>  * For contributors, the ability to submit bundles rather than patches
> so that their version control information is preserved.

Right.  Or just push up personal branches to Launchpad, and ask a core
doc team member to merge from their personal branch.


> The disadvantages over our current workflow are:
> 
>  * Speed seems poor compared to svn: because the whole revision
> history is downloaded when branching, there is more material to
> download.

That's not necessarily so.  You can recommend doing a bzr checkout, so
that it works more like svn, with minimal data locally, and talking to
the central server for commits.

Even with this model, if you get disconnected from the central server,
bzr will prompt you to do a commit --local, and continue working while
disconnected.


>  * Bzr's feedback during upload/download is pretty bad - for example
> when checking out a branch of our repository the status indicator
> generally starts at 30%, takes an hour to get to 50%, then jumps
> quickly to 100%.

That's true.  I wonder if that's any better with the bzr+ssh protocol
instead of sftp?


> To be honest, (although I'm slightly concerned about the speed issue)
> both the advantages and the disadvantages at the moment seem
> relatively insignificant. It may be that they don't warrant changing
> version control systems at this stage, which would require a certain
> amount of effort, rewriting of our documentation, and generally as
> contributors getting used to a new system.
>
> However, I think it's likely that in the future there will be some
> more substantial advantages. For example, I'm told that there are
> plans for Launchpad to support shared repositories, which will permit
> revision history to be stored on the serverside only and improve
> download speeds. Maybe there will be other improvements too.
> 
> Thoughts?

I know that the Canonical sysadmins are maintaining an SVN server just
for the ubuntu doc project.  They would rather not do this, as there is
a degree of overhead in keeping it running securely.

-- Steve