[Gnu-arch-users] Re: arch commit on large trees ?

[Matthieu Moy]

"Philippe Moutarlier" <address@hidden> writes:

> I am confused. I have created the revision library with sparse and
> greedy options, changed a single line in a single file, and I am 5
> minutes down my commit still waiting on "update pristine tree ..."

If it updates your pristine tree, then most probably you didn't
configure your revision library to be greedy (see library-config).

> OK , now it is done : 6 minutes for 1 file ?

1 file or all the files in your tree do not change much. Commit means
"compute all the changes in the working directory, and upload this
changeset". For that, arch needs a reference tree (it can be a
pristine, ie in your working tree, or in the revision library).

> I know I can commit a single file separately, but what about a
> directory ? It took 10 minutes to add 10 files and commit.

Probably most of the time was spent building the reference tree. This
is done by copying the closest reference tree available, and applying
changesets from the archive to build the new one. The first time,
you'll start with base-0, and apply all changesets up to patch-N
(latest revision). But if you have a greedy revision library, then
next time, you'll already have patch-N, and you'll want to build
patch-(N+1), which is much faster.

In baz 1.5 (the development version, but it's quite stable actually),
the reference tree for patch-(N+1) is built automatically when you
commit after patch-N, so, doing

  baz status
  baz commit
  baz status
  baz commit
  baz status

will need to build the reference tree for the first "baz status", and
then, only "baz commit" will need access to the archive, and only to
upload the changeset. Surprisingly, you never read anything from the
archive, and "baz status" can be a disconnected operation.

> Does arch scale up to big projects with this patch applying mechanism ?

I've never used it for "big" projects, but have a look at
http://arch.ubuntu.com/ if you want to have an idea of how bazaar
is used in a big organization.

Emacs development partly uses Arch for its development. "baz status"
in the Emacs tree takes 3.1 seconds on my machine (2358 source files).
Commit is a bit longer that status, but not much. Most of the time is
spent in the changeset computation.

-- 
Matthieu