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

David Roundy droundy at abridgegame.org
Fri Apr 1 05:19:18 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 think the best solution to this is to introduce a reordering option to
optimize, which would reorder the patches in a smart way.  In particular,
it would try to arrange the patches so that all patches not included in a
tag occur after that tag.  This reduces the amount of context that needs to
be sent, plus makes commands like pull more efficient.

I don't think this would be too hard for a moderately knowledgeable (with
regard to darcs) haskeller, or one who is interested in understanding the
patch theory better.

> I am new to darcs so first I have to ask if there are people
> bothered by this other than myself.  Having asked that, my next
> question is if there is anything that can be done about this.
> 
> 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?

I don't know, I like to be able to actually read the context and see why it
is that I can't apply a patch.  And this also makes the error messages
easier to understand.  If I've unpulled a patch that is in the context of a
bundle sent to me, I'd rather see the name of that patch than its hash.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net




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