[Gnu-arch-users] Re: clean up tla help

[Matthieu Moy]

Mikhael Goikhman <address@hidden> writes:

> Did you read the summer threads ("Obsoleting abrowse"), when we with
> Matthieu Moy discussed the ui and speed issues of abrowse versus rbrowse?
>
> If you give some limit, like category--branch, then you may easily get
> 20 seconds versus 2 minutes speed difference for a tla archive format.

tla's rbrowse has several performance problems. The ones I remember
are:

1) it doesn't show the output gradually (not a "performance" problem,
   but the user has feels it's slow)

2) it fetches some information twice (strace | grep helps. IIRC, it
   fetches the log file once to apply the filter and once more for
   the output)

3) it fetches all the information even if you provide a limit (since
   the limit is a regexp, it could hardly do otherwise). This case is
   optimize_able_ (but not optimiz_ed_) in the case of Baz archives.

In Bazaar 1.5, rbrowse (which I've renamed to simply "browse") has
similar performance to abrowse. IIRC, it's still stg like 1% slower,
but you won't notice.

There's quite a bit of work to get tla's rbrowse as fast as abrowse.
The shortest way is probably to start from Bazaar 1.5's version (it
won't work out of the box on tla because it uses some Bazaar-only
internal API).

-- 
Matthieu