Bazaar on the slow track

Quite. I just pulled the last five days of Emacs development with bzr 2.5. It pulled down 16905Kb at wildly varying rates all well below line speed, and re-evaluated its infuriating 'estimate' of amount to be transferred five times. Does anyone believe that Emacs actually had 17Mb of changes in the last week? You'd be right.

Getting a diff of the changes on trunk -- entirely in core -- took four seconds (not too shabby but still terribly slow compared to git, where in-core diffs often run at rates in excess of 30,000 lines per second), and revealed

311 files changed, 3025 insertions(+), 2658 deletions(-)

A wc of the output says

12952 55987 447812

so "bzr pull" had to receive roughly thirty times as much data as was actually changed, and that's despite the fact that patches contain lots of redundant context info that hasn't actually changed in any way at all.

I'm sorry, but no matter which way you slice it, bzr is still hilariously inefficient. It may not be *unusably* inefficient anymore, but that's damning with very faint praise.