Alan Bram wrote: > It appears that the old repo format works a little faster than the > new, in my case. Does that make sense?
Yes it does, especially for darcs whatsnew... with old repo format to find the pristine copy of a file it's quite simple: filename.txt -> _darcs/pristine/filename.txt It simply looks for the same file in a different directory, which will always be fast. Hashed format does this instead: filename.txt --hashing algorithm--> _darcs/pristine.hashed/HEX_GIBBERISH This is more robust (a stupid script, and/or ignorant developer, adding a header to all .txt files won't accidentally edit the pristine cache and cause corruption) and more secure (even if said stupid script is using mime-type guessing and still manages to edit the HEX_GIBBERISH named file like 00001-cafedeadbeef darcs nows thanks to the hashed signature of the file knows that the file is corrupted and can auto-repair before causing more serious problems in the repository such as spurious darcs whatsnew output) and more sharable (because the hashes are based on the state of the file, repositories with files in the same pristine state can easily share the exact same hashed pristine file). The trade-off for all of these benefits is that darcs no longer can simply check if two files named the same thing in different directories have different last modification dates, it has to do a little bit more computation. (Not to say that the way things are currently done is the most performant, just that its obvious darcs is doing a bit more work and for good reason, so you can expect some performance difference, but I'm sure we'd all prefer that difference to be as small as possible.) Is that a decent explanation? (Or is it still too technical?) I've been slowly trying to get more stuff like this into the darcs manual itself, so feedback is more than welcome... I find that with this stuff it helps me to write a couple of times in different ways to find the right approach. Anyway, I personally have had more than enough experience of accidental pristine corruption and I think the trade-off is worth it. -- --Max Battcher-- http://www.worldmaker.ne/ _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
