What should be in the roadmap?

A good roadmap provides a place for contributors to look for tasks, it provides users with a sense of when we will fix things that are affecting them, and it also allows us all to agree about where we are headed. So the roadmap should contain enough things to let all this happen.

I think that it needs to contain the analysis work which is required, a list of the use cases to be optimised, the disk changes required, and the broad sense of the api changes required. It also needs to list the inter-dependencies between these things: we should aim for a large surface area of ‘ready to be worked on’ items, that makes it easy to improve performance without having to work in lockstep with other developers.

Clearly the analysis step is an immediate bottleneck - we cannot tell if an optimisation for use case A is a pessimism for use case B until we have analysed both A and B. I propose that we complete the analysis of say a dozen core use cases end to end during the upcoming sprint in London. We should then be able to fork() for much of the detailed design work and regroup with disk and api changes shortly thereafter.

I suspect that clarity of layering will make a big difference to developer parallelism, so another proposal I have is for us to look at the APIs for Branch and Repository in London in the light of what we have learnt over the last years.

What should the final system look like, how is it different to what we have today?

One of the things I like the most about bzr is its rich library API, and I’ve heard this from numerous other folk. So anything that will remove that should be considered a last resort.

Similarly our relatively excellent cross platform support is critical for projects that are themselves cross platform, and thats a considerable number these days.

And of course, our focus on doing the right thing is what differentiates us from some of the other VCS’s, so we should be focusing on doing the right thing quickly :).

What we have today though has grown organically in response to us identifying bottlenecks over several iterations of back end storage, branch metadata and the local tree representation. I think we are largely past that and able to describe the ideal characteristics of the major actors in the system - primarily Tree, Branch, Repository - based on what we have learnt.

What use cases should be covered?

My list of use cases is probably not complete - its just the ones I happen to see a lot :). I think each should be analysed comprehensively so we dont need to say ‘push over the network’ - its implied in the scaling analysis that both semantic and file operation latency will be considered.

These use cases are ordered by roughly the ease of benchmarking, and the frequency of use. This ordering is so that when people are comparing bzr they are going to get use cases we have optimised; and so that as we speed things up our existing users will have the things they do the most optimised.

  • status tree

  • status subtree

  • commit

  • commit to a bound branch

  • incremental push/pull

  • log

  • log path

  • add

  • initial push or pull [both to a new repo and an existing repo with different data in it]

  • diff tree

  • diff subtree

  • revert tree

  • revert subtree

  • merge from a branch

  • merge from a bundle

  • annotate

  • create a bundle against a branch

  • uncommit

  • missing

  • update

  • cbranch

How is development on the roadmap coordinated?

I think we should hold regular get-togethers (on IRC) to coordinate on our progress, because this is a big task and its a lot easier to start helping out some area which is having trouble if we have kept in contact about each areas progress. This might be weekly or fortnightly or some such.

we need a shared space to record the results of the analysis and the roadmap as we go forward. Given that we’ll need to update these as new features are considered, I propose that we use doc/design as a working space, and as we analyse use cases we include them in there - including the normal review process for each patch. We also need documentation about doing performance tuning - not the minutiae, though that is needed, but about how to effective choose things to optimise which will give the best return on time spent - that is what the roadmap should help with, but this looks to be a large project and an overview will be of great assistance I think. We want to help everyone that wishes to contribute to performance to do so effectively.

Finally, it’s important to note that coding is not the only contribution - testing, giving feedback on current performance, helping with the analysis are all extremely important tasks too and we probably want to have clear markers of where that should be done to encourage such contributions.