Critical features for developers with low bandwidth connections

[chamindra]

Reference question: https://answers.edge.launchpad.net/launchpad-registry/+question/98691

I am a new user to launchpad and bzr, so please correct me if this functionality is already there. I am currently accessing the bzr service on launchpad from Sri Lanka and it is quite slow. I have 30 hops to get to the server from my machine. I had already registered a query on it crashing. A bzr pull and push thus takes upto 15 to 30 mins for me (on the sahana), thus any efficiencies that can be brought into launchpad to reduce this can be of great help to us access this site with a very low throughput.

Here are some feature requests:
- Ability to clone a branch to either one of your own or another on the website (saves a pull and a push)
- Ability to merge the code into the proposed branch automatically, if there are no conflicts. I realize you should first pull, merge (meld), test and push. But it would be easier especially if the merge delta is small, to merge directly to the proposed branch onsite and then pull an update to test it works. You can always revert it back.
- downloadable and (preferably mirrored) zip, tar.gz, etc archives of the latest revision of that branch.

Chamindra de Silva

[chamindra (chamindra)]

Would also like to add a query if on uploading a new branch, weather bzr is intelligent enough to recognize a delta to an existing branch it was forked from and thus only upload the incremental changes. If this is not implemented, I would imagine that it would drastically improve performance.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

Sorry that noone has responded in detail yet. Most of your questions relate to https://launchpad.net/bzr and you will get better information there (e.g. on https://answers.launchpad.net/bzr).

On these points though, I can give some data:
   - Ability to clone a branch to either one of your own or another on the website (saves a pull and a push)

I think the ability to push to a 3rd party website would be open to abuse, and is better handled by having such a website pull from Launchpad - for public branches (the vast majority) this is simpler as no credential management is needed. That said, the sequence 'branch from lp, push to another branch in lp' should be very efficient - the stacking process will mean that the push only needs to transfer about 100K of data.

  - Ability to merge the code into the proposed branch automatically, if there are no conflicts. I realize you should first pull, merge (meld), test and push. But it would be easier especially if the merge delta is small, to merge directly to the proposed branch onsite and then pull an update to test it works. You can always revert it back.

We have a separate bug for this already (bug 657550)

- downloadable and (preferably mirrored) zip, tar.gz, etc archives of the latest revision of that branch.

We have a separate bug for this already (bug 515128)

So I'm going to move this to the bzr project for the remaining thing you asked about to be addressed.

Cheers,
Rob

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

The first aspect of this is pretty much
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/408097> which is that we could
possibly have a button to make a branch entirely server-side.

Regarding raw speed, there are a bunch of individual bugs in
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/bzr/+bugs?field.tag=performance> and this
is a kind of dupe.

Martin