[darcs-users] Darcs for GHC [was: darcs weekly news #28]

Simon Marlow marlowsd at gmail.com
Wed May 13 21:20:03 UTC 2009


On 13/05/09 04:54, Trent W. Buck wrote:
> Eric Kow<kowey at darcs.net>  writes:
>> Nevertheless, if the GHC team are going to postpone their switch, what
>> can we do to make their current darcs experience more enjoyable?
>
> Do we know how long GHC plan (either officially or unofficially) to
> defer their VCS migration for?  It's all very well for us to talk about
> a twelve-month roadmap for major improvements, but if GHC are really
> looking at migrating in the next quarter, that's not going to help.

It's probably time we took another look at the options, that's all. 
Darcs still doesn't really support the development model we'd really 
like though (long-lived branches and lots of merging).  On the other 
hand, darcs is supporting our other workflows reasonably well - for 
example pulling fixes into the stable branch is usually nice and easy.

We still have problems with darcs on Windows - e.g. see Simon PJ's 
recent bug report about a random "permission denied" failure that left 
the repo in a trashed state.

>> Maybe we could get them to use hashed format repositories with --lazy
>> so that they don't have to ship tarballs around?
>
> I think that getting their team using darcs 2.2 and --hashed
> repositories is a relatively easy thing to do, and would have
> significant benefits for them.

I want to try out hashed again.  Last time I tried it, there were 
performance problems, but it turned out that hashed repos were using a 
global cache by default, and my home dir is NFS-mounted.  There was a 
problem with turning off the global cache IIRC - has that been fixed 
now?  I'd really like to either disable the cache, or point it to 
somewhere locally mounted.

Does the cache still put all its files in one directory?  That was one 
source of the performance problems, I think.

Cheers,
	Simon



More information about the darcs-users mailing list