[darcs-devel] Compressing Patches, LZO, and that .gz.

[Ian Lynagh]

On Sat, Apr 16, 2005 at 07:47:04AM -0400, David Roundy wrote:
> 
> I agree that leaving the .gz out would have been a good idea, but I don't
> think that changing now would be a good idea, since for backwards
> compatibility we'd have to try both filenames, and that would be a pain.  I
> think this is a transition we can make when we switch to a hashed
> inventory, and storing patches according to a hash of the patch contents,
> since at that time we'll have to deal with a repository format transition
> anyways.

Do you mean the patch with hash abcdefg gets stored in a/b/abcdefg, or
something cleverer?

I think we need to do at least this at some point soon; the Linux repo
has 27k patches, which I think is approaching the point at which ext2
starts getting unhappy. I think once we've decided how deep a hierarchy
we want, all we need to do for 1.0.3 is have darcs look there as well as
at the root for the file.

Then in 1.0.4 (or later) we can create the file there instead and
provide a migration script. Finally, in 1.0.5 (or later) we can stop
looking in the root. We could also make it a repo option for a bit
whether we use the hierarchy if backwards compatibility is important.


Thanks
Ian