Hi!
Since I had to compile a custom kernel from current sources to do some
debugging, I thought of checking out the hg repository mirror. I read in
the past time on the ailing list a lot of heated discussion.
I was skeptical, and... I had reason to apparently. I tried on a
dual-core intel laptop with 3GB of RAM. Something fairly decent.
At first I tried over WiFi it interrupted after one hour or so, no
error message, no nothing and "nothing" was saved
Then I tried again, still WiFI, after 2 hours or so... it just looked
stuck: no disk activity, no network, no CPU usage for quite some time !
I hit "ctrl-c" and it catched the signal, rolled back cleanly.
While working I noticed a quite high memory usage, in the order of 400MB
or more, something that would be unbearable
Wireless coverage is very good, being in the same room of the AP.
Then I retried, but over wired ethernet. Now, after some hours, it
finally finished without hiccups
I think Python is not up to the job. Sensible to network quality, low
performance, high memory usage. I think the tool to work on the base
system should be obtainable with the base system - so it should be
written in C or C++ with minimal dependencies.
Of course this could be mitigated by having a "CVS mirror" or "SVN
mirror" so that one could user other tools to check it out. I do that
for example on certain systems, I check out from github using SVN.
This is just an experience of using it for a checkout, I do not enter
the merit if it has better commands than git, svn or cvs.
I'm a git hater as far as its commands do, how it handles conflicts and
the dependencies it has when installing it. But I must admit it that
regarding check-out stability, network and CPU usage it works quite well.
SVN (especially over its protocol, not https) and CVS rule too: slow but
steady they get the result. Also, it is usuall easy to recover with just
another "svn update" or "cvs update".
If mercurial is really a good system (and apparently it should be better
than git) it shold have equivalent git performances: so written in
C/C++, not funky interpreters, not funky languages like Rust, Go...
Until then, let's trust CVS... it maybe slow, clunky.. but it breaks as
we know.
CVS is like a wood-powered steam locomotive
SVN is like a classic diesel powered locomotive.
GIT is a high-powered pertol car, but they split the steering wheel
in two.You have two clutch pedals to shift gears and if you break before
pulling the clutch the motor explodes :)
HG is perhaps a good concept sports car, but it is built of plywood.
So you always get CVS and SVN working, git is blazing fast if you need
just to spint 1/4 mile and don't steer or change anything .
Riccardo
