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

[Mike Taylor]

I brought this up on IRC but wanted to echo it here:

I thought we could pre-generate the repository during the distribution 
phase (which would solve the portability issue) but it was mentioned 
that certain UI information like size, color depth and state would make 
the pre-built repository look bad or even not work.

If this is the only thing that would prevent a pre-generated repo from 
being used couldn't we not store this information?  Was it stored for 
performance reasons?

Also, if we are storing this information, I think we setting ourselves 
up for a lot of bugs in the future when someone does any monitor 
upgrading.

If pre-generation is still not an option then I would +1 the splash 
screen change.

On Jun 7, 2007, at 4:17 PM, 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.
>
> -- 
>   Heikki Toivonen
>
>
> _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
>
> Open Source Applications Foundation "chandler-dev" mailing list
> http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/chandler-dev
>
---
Bear

Build and Release Engineer
Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF)
bear at osafoundation.org
http://www.osafoundation.org

bear at code-bear.com
http://code-bear.com

PGP Fingerprint = 9996 719F 973D B11B E111  D770 9331 E822 40B3 CD29


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/chandler-dev/attachments/20070607/f6b96bff/PGP.pgp