[darcs-devel] Re: darcs patch: update Changelog for RT#305 - "--patch" removed from '...

Tomasz Zielonka tomasz.zielonka at gmail.com
Fri Apr 1 05:17:44 PST 2005


On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 04:51:37PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> This is no way a complaint to Mark's patch.
> 
> But I am bothered by the fact that the said `patch' contains a
> 2-line patch name and author and time identification, a 3-line
> addition, along with close to 4000-line (!) context information
> that lists around 880 patches.  To a human who is getting this
> in a mailbox, that is quite a low S/N ratio.
> 
> While I am not asking to drop context information (I *do*
> understand why the context information is needed by darcs to
> exchange patches between repos), I still am annoyed how verbose
> it looks.
> 
> I am new to darcs so first I have to ask if there are people
> bothered by this other than myself.

I am slightly bothered.

> Having asked that, my next question is if there is anything that can
> be done about this.

One currently available solution is tagging.

AFAIU, other solution would be to compute minimal context, but David
says this would be a huge efficiency problem.

> What immediately comes to mind is to record context information
> more concisely using hashes instead of what is currently
> recorded (the patch name with full comments plus author and time
> identification).  A hash (taken from darcs changes --xml from a
> random repo) looks like this:
> 
> 20050331205823-f654b-fa39cef354632b8e9930c254aa9d3ea066061dfe.gz
> 
> and after dropping noise letters like '-' and '.gz a 59-byte
> long token remains.  Fitting one such hash on each line would
> shrink the context information in the mail from around 4000
> lines down to 880 lines (around 125kB to 53kB).  Are there
> anybody who is interested in such a change?

There are problems with this approach. For example, what would you
do if darcs told you that it can't apply a patch because your repo
doesn't contain patch
20050331205823f654bfa39cef354632b8e9930c254aa9d3ea066061dfe
? With current scheme you at least get the patch author's email.

Best regards
Tomasz




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