Bazaar 0.91 released!

Congratulations to the Bazaar team on the release of 0.91!

Stop using dumb protocols

Probably long overdue, but we set a bzr serve daemon running on our R&D site.

Hackers who had write access to create their own branches there used the bzr server automatically since they “bzr push bzr+ssh://…and can also use it forbranching andpulling. Most other people, however, were doing an initial checkout viahttp://because that's the URL we published. Which wasn't very nice of us: initial checkout time for java-gnome from using the dumbhttp://` protocol used to be 20 minutes (serious round-trip penalty when from Australia to Europe. Ouch).

Switching to bzr:// dropped the time to clone a branch to 1 minute 46 seconds… Sweet! And that’s even before the monster revision streaming and repository format performance improvements that are likely to land in the 0.92 – 0.93 time frame! Excuse me while I rush off to update our README and HACKING files :).

Yes, dumb protocol time was abysmal — But http is a convenience for when all else fails, and has the nice side effect of allowing people to surf your public branch’s code. The problem is that people don’t necessarily get around to putting the server in place (most people could if they tried).

AfC