[Kde-scm-interest] Bazaar and KDE

[Paul Hummer]

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KDE Developers-

Recently, the Launchpad code team assisted the Gnome community in
setting up http://bzr-playground.gnome.org where we've mirrored all
the gnome modules from svn into bazaar branches.  We are quite
interested in helping set up the same for the KDE community.  We're
hoping to get it done before aKademy 2008.

Steve Kelly made some inquiries into Bazaar's capabilities.  Among
them were:

* Speed of operations such as pull, push, status, commit, diff, log,
checkout,
annotate

Network operations like push and pull will definitely take longer than
commit, status, and diff.  Bazaar, admittedly, is not the fastest
DVCS, but it makes up for that by increasing workflow flexibility so
you don't spend a whole day trying to resolve conflicts.  It's also
important to know that Bazaar is constantly being optimized.

* Proven record with a source tree and history as large as KDE.

MySQL is using Bazaar on a daily basis, and has been stretching Bazaar
quite well, allowing us to really produce a strong product.  Launchpad
is also using Bazaar, and has about 60000 revisions (though that still
is relatively small)

* Barrier to entry for new contributors, especially those with no prior
experience with version control.

The Bazaar developers spend significant time ensuring that the UI is
easy to use.  In fact, I showed a young developer how to use Bazaar
last night.  In about an hour, he had 10 revisions of a college
project he was working on, and understood some of the most advanced
techniques of distributed version control.

* How the current tree would need to be divided up. A proposal for
using git
was to have a separate git tree for each offical KDE module
(http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/), and separate trees for each
application
outside of that and in extragear (http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/extragear/)
(amarok, kile, digikam etc). Would the same or similar structure make
sense
in a bzr system?

This is similar to the way bzr-playground.gnome.org also works.
Branches and trunk from each svn repository would be imported as their
own bazaar branches.

* Size on disc or full and partial history.

Bazaar uses a compressed format, but the exact amount of compression
will vary by project (e.g. whether or not you sign commits, etc).
Bazaar is in the process of adding support partial history through
stacked branches, which are available in bzr1.6beta3.

We would very much like to assist in setting up bzr-playground.kde.org
for you to use to experiment with.  If someone within the KDE
community would please contact me, we can get the ball rolling on this.

Thanks,
Paul Hummer
Launchpad Bazaar Integration Team

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