[Chandler-dev] Ship with prebuilt repo or not?

[Bryan Stearns]

+1

Heikki Toivonen wrote:
> We need to make a decision with regards to bug
> https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4192, which is about
> shipping Chandler with prebuilt repository to speed up the first startup.
>
> First time startup is about three times slower than when starting with
> an existing empty repository. On my computer first time startup takes 10
> seconds, on the PPC Mac mini we use for performance tests it would take
> about 45 seconds.
>
> The rationale behind this bug is that first time impressions are
> important, and if the very first time to launch Chandler takes forever,
> it leaves a bad impression.
>
> Personally I am against this for various reasons:
>
> * This would mean either shipping with a prebuilt repository, which
> would increase the download size quite a bit (on Linux the first empty
> repo is 15M uncompressed, 5.2 M gzipped, or the absolute minimum, 1.8 M
> when using gzipped repository backup where files that will be
> automatically rebuilt have been removed), or generating the repository
> during install time by launching Chandler at the end of installation (we
> don't have installers for all platforms, and users can get Chandler
> without installer as well; Launching at the end of install is kind of
> rude, and can lead to confusion in other ways.
>
> * Even with prebuilt repository, we'd need to copy the prebuilt repo to
> the correct location on first startup, which would in itself also slow
> down the first startup.
>
> * It seems like a fair bit of work for just the first startup.
>
> My suggestion is to change the progress messages for first startup
> splash screen to say something like "Constructing database" to make it
> clear that this only happens once.
>
>   
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