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What should be in the roadmap?
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==============================
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A good roadmap provides a place for contributors to look for tasks, it
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provides users with a sense of when we will fix things that are
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affecting them, and it also allows us all to agree about where we are
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headed. So the roadmap should contain enough things to let all this
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I think that it needs to contain the analysis work which is required, a
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list of the use cases to be optimised, the disk changes required, and
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the broad sense of the api changes required. It also needs to list the
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inter-dependencies between these things: we should aim for a large
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surface area of 'ready to be worked on' items, that makes it easy to
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improve performance without having to work in lockstep with other
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Clearly the analysis step is an immediate bottleneck - we cannot tell if
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an optimisation for use case A is a pessimism for use case B until we
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have analysed both A and B. I propose that we complete the analysis of
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say a dozen core use cases end to end during the upcoming sprint in
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London. We should then be able to fork() for much of the detailed design
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work and regroup with disk and api changes shortly thereafter.
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I suspect that clarity of layering will make a big difference to
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developer parallelism, so another proposal I have is for us to look at
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the APIs for Branch and Repository in London in the light of what we
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have learnt over the last years.
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What should the final system look like, how is it different to what we have today?
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==================================================================================
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One of the things I like the most about bzr is its rich library API, and
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I've heard this from numerous other folk. So anything that will remove
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that should be considered a last resort.
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Similarly our relatively excellent cross platform support is critical
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for projects that are themselves cross platform, and thats a
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considerable number these days.
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And of course, our focus on doing the right thing is what differentiates
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us from some of the other VCS's, so we should be focusing on doing the
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right thing quickly :).
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What we have today though has grown organically in response to us
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identifying bottlenecks over several iterations of back end storage,
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branch metadata and the local tree representation. I think we are
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largely past that and able to describe the ideal characteristics of the
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major actors in the system - primarily Tree, Branch, Repository - based
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on what we have learnt.
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What use cases should be covered?
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=================================
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My list of use cases is probably not complete - its just the ones I
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happen to see a lot :). I think each should be analysed comprehensively
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so we dont need to say 'push over the network' - its implied in the
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scaling analysis that both semantic and file operation latency will be
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These use cases are ordered by roughly the ease of benchmarking, and the
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frequency of use. This ordering is so that when people are comparing bzr
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they are going to get use cases we have optimised; and so that as we
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speed things up our existing users will have the things they do the most
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* commit to a bound branch
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* incremental push/pull
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* initial push or pull [both to a new repo and an existing repo with
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* create a bundle against a branch
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How is development on the roadmap coordinated?
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==============================================
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I think we should hold regular get-togethers (on IRC) to coordinate on
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our progress, because this is a big task and its a lot easier to start
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helping out some area which is having trouble if we have kept in contact
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about each areas progress. This might be weekly or fortnightly or some
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we need a shared space to record the results of the analysis and the
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roadmap as we go forward. Given that we'll need to update these as new
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features are considered, I propose that we use doc/design as a working
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space, and as we analyse use cases we include them in there - including
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the normal review process for each patch. We also need documentation
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about doing performance tuning - not the minutiae, though that is
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needed, but about how to effective choose things to optimise which will
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give the best return on time spent - that is what the roadmap should
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help with, but this looks to be a large project and an overview will be
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of great assistance I think. We want to help everyone that wishes to
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contribute to performance to do so effectively.
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Finally, its important to note that coding is not the only contribution
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- testing, giving feedback on current performance, helping with the
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analysis are all extremely important tasks too and we probably want to
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have clear markers of where that should be done to encourage such
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doc/developers/performance-roadmap-rationale.txt
