Comment 5 for bug 736001

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On 3/16/2011 3:54 PM, Julian Edwards wrote:
> I didn't mean to sound like I was complaining, sorry if I did! I just wanted
> to stimulate a conversation around exploring more detail, which I certainly
> have. :)
>
>> If it seriously regularly spends 20 minutes repacking, then we have a
>> serious issue. Any chance you can actually quantify how often it happens?
>
> It's been often enough lately that I noticed, I can't be more accurate, sorry.
> It may be partially down to the fact that I have a Launchpad repo on a few
> machines and the long wait is obvious if it happens more than once. I also
> heard a few other people saying that it's happened to them, so it does explain
> the increased exposure I guess.
>
> I totally understand that this might not happen very often in reality, but
> when it does it can be annoying. Perhaps another way around it is to provide
> a way to override the repack so I can complete my operation that I want done,
> and pack it later?
>
> Anyway, I guess it won't bite me again for a while now :)
>
> Cheers.
>

Well, if you have multiple repos, they might trigger close to the same
time if your fetching habits are similar in each. And certainly,
triggering it in one doesn't help the others get repacked.

I've thought about having 'bzr pack --soft'. 'bzr pack' by default
repacks everything, but a '--soft' option could potential leave really
large pack files alone, or something along those lines.

Certainly we could give a config option to prompt if it is going to
repack more than N revisions. Though again that brings up surprising
behavior that happens very infrequently.

Other options would be "don't repack files over a certain size/num
revisions" and just let the user know they might want to run 'bzr pack'
manually. But there again, you don't really want to prompt on every
command that gets run.

We could spawn a process that does the auto-packing in the background,
but people don't really expect a command line vcs to do that sort of thing.

John
=:->
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