On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:02 AM, Taylor R Campbell<[email protected]> wrote: > I am a long-time user of Darcs, having begun to use it in either 2003 > or 2004, and with very few exceptions I have been thoroughly pleased > by the experience of using Darcs, as well as by the responsiveness of > the Darcs team to my quibbles in #darcs. Thank you!
Thank you! > After some discussion in #darcs a while ago (months, perhaps a year or > two), I believe Jason Dagit (lispy) told me that he had implemented > some kind of on-disk cache mapping pathnames to lists of patches that > could affect the files at those pathnames. I want to clarify. That work was not mine. Perhaps the way I spoke of it made it sound like I did it or thought of it, but sadly I can't claim ownership to either the design or implementation. > In any case, irrespective of precisely how this cache is constructed, > will any such mechanism ever be included in Darcs to reduce the > frustration of waiting for `darcs changes <pathname>'? Yes. Certainly. But let me explain. A major concern between darcs developers for some time now has been the understandability of the source code and the theory/data model that drives it. The work we did with type witnesses should help significantly with this, but we could still improve the situation substantially. Adding more comprehensive tests also helps. The understandability of darcs has been a major concern because if we are to correctly optimize darcs we need to start with a correct darcs and know that when we are done we still have a correct darcs. What I'm suggesting is that, now that we have spent more time working on the internal understandability of the source code, we are able to now refocus on the performance issues without sacrificing stability. Petr Rockai did a Google Summer of Code project this summer with the explicit and ambitious goal of making darcs much faster, especially when querying the repository. Camp, a related version control project, seeks to bring to light any flaws in the patch theory also helping to increase the understandability of darcs. I can only see things improving over time. There is more to say on this, but I think others who have already responded have explained a lot :) Thanks, Jason _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
