[Gnu-arch-users] Re: Obsoleting abrowse

[Matthieu Moy]

Miles Bader <address@hidden> writes:

> The strong point of abrowse in my experience is that it was much,
> much, faster than rbrowse in some cases (with remote repositories),
> because it could avoid fetching every revision.

It was mostly more fluid, because it fetched the log for a full
version before displaying anything.

After benchmarking and "strace"-ing a little, I understand the problem
you're refering to: rbrowse will fetch all the revisions (not all the
log files, but the .listing file for the version) and filter them
afterwards. This results in an overhead for tla 1.0 archives (I didn't
check for baz archives. We may be downloading the same .listing file
several times, but this will be solved when using the flattened
namespace).

For regexp search, we can't do otherwise. For string search, it would
probably result in an awfull hack, with rather low benefit since the
problem will be solved as people migrate to baz archive format.

I'm now convinced we have to let abrowse in 1.5. It's currently
obsoleted in the sense "not in the output of baz help, and displays a
warning stating that it will be removed". Newcomers will learn to use
browse, which is the way of the future, while long time users will
almost not see the difference.

-- 
Matthieu