[darcs-users] darcs patch: add exception to haskell_policy.sh for D... (and 61 more)

[Trent W. Buck]

On Sun, Nov 02, 2008 at 06:42:16PM -0500, David Roundy wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 6:29 PM, Trent W. Buck <trentbuck at gmail.com> wrote:
> > David Roundy <droundy at darcs.net> writes:
> >> On Sun, Nov 02, 2008 at 06:35:53PM +0000, Ganesh Sittampalam wrote:
> >>> On Fri, 31 Oct 2008, David Roundy wrote:
> >>>> Performance patches are *always* low priority, and should therefore
> >>>> should only be made when they are both certain to be correct
> >>>
> >>> Please could you clarify what you mean by that? Much optimisation
> >>> work will never be "certain to be correct". For example, the darcs
> >>> annotate cache work will inevitably be too complicated to satisfy
> >>> that criterion.  Even the recent series of patches I submitted, which
> >>> were all quite "local" in some sense, still needed some testing to
> >>> shake out bugs, and there's certainly no absolute guarantee that
> >>> there are none left.
> >>
> >> My first and absolute priority is to make darcs as bug-free as
> >> possible.  I understand that changes are necessary, and that any
> >> change may introduce a bug, and therefore every change needs to be
> >> carefully considered, what it's benefits are versus its risks.
> >
> > Do user complaints like "darcs is too slow and we are switching to
> > git/hg" constitute bug reports? ;-)
> 
> Most users who complain about darcs' speed complain about its scaling,
> or at least problems for which it scales poorly.  A constant factor
> speed increase isn't going to keep them in the fold.

Granted.  Sorry, I thought "performance patches" meant *all* patches
that refactor to improve performance, not just the ones that reduce
the Θ(k.x) constant k.