[darcs-users] http://code.haskell.org/darcs/packs is back

[Gwern Branwen]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 12:02 PM, Florent Becker
<florent.becker at ens-lyon.org> wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> during the sprint, team Paris' mission was to implement packs of patches
> to speed up get. The idea was to put several patches in the same file,
> in order to reduce latency while downloading. This goal was not reached
> during the sprint. We produced a wiki page
> http://wiki.darcs.net/index.html/Packs_Specification, and now there is a
> repository http://code.haskell.org/darcs/packs where the implementation
> has started. The darcs there is able to read a repository in which some
> patch are found inside packs, that is a compressed file containing
> several patches. Pack creation does not happen now, but should be
> implemented via a darcs optimize --pack command. This would pack all the
> patches which are under a tag, since they are less susceptible to be
> cherry-picked. It would probably be run when using darcs tag.
>
> Packs are coming soon!
>
> Florent

If I am understanding the wiki page correctly, a Darcs-2 repository
which has packs available for itself will then be backwards
incompatible with all previous darcs 1.x and 2.x binaries?

It seems to me that one big repo backwards-incompatibility was bad
enough; is there no way packs could be implemented such that 2.x
binaries simply ignore packs and download patches like normal if they
do not support packs?

--
gwern