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

[Junio C Hamano]

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.  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?