Hi all, I just helped a coworker patiently waiting several minutes for a "darcs pull" to give him some output. Darcs is terribly slow and performance tuning won't help here. The cause was that _darcs/prefs/sources contained an HTTP repository URL with an IP Address but the host was down. When I turned on --debug-verbose it was clear to me what the problem is. I often help with such problems - but I'd rather not and as a regular Darcs users you're annoyed if something like that happens. Because the fix is so simple (if you know what to do) I didn't bother to report it as a bug. In fact: I won't complain anymore beyond this email. But I can understand why people use git instead. Without turning-on debugging output I couldn't say why pulling a few simple, small patches from a fast remote server is taking so long. And even if I turn on debugging nobody can expect a user to understand why Darcs is so smart that it tries to access a different host that is down. I don't know why there was no timeout or if the timeout took too long or if Darcs tried the same host several times. The fact is: a regular, experienced darcs user can easily get the impression that Darcs is slow or doesn't work at all.
I understand that the different sources are necessary for lazy repositories. I think we have to assume that we won't get good timeout behavior all of the time. And even if the cause might be DNS or a firewall: the problem is, that a) the user doesn't know it has nothing to do with URL she gave on the command line and b) she doesn't know how to fix it. I think Darcs should be changed that it 1. outputs a message if it tries to access a repository other than that given on the command line 2. -- David Leuschner Kartäuserstraße 51b 79102 Freiburg Tel.: +49 761 4296027 _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
