[darcs-devel] Can someone take a look at issue124?

[David Roundy]

Simon pointed out an optimization that we really ought to be doing--keeping
track of which files modify which patches to make changes and annotate much
faster when looking at a particular file.  I think this is an important job
of moderate complexity that any of a number of you guys could tackle if
you're interested.  It's a chance to do darcs optimization without having
to understand the trickinesses of optimization in Haskell, since you'd be
doing algorithmic optimizations rather than code tuning--and that's where
all the real benefits are to be gained anyways (except for space
optimizations...).

I just figured I'd float a note here to see if anyone cares to volunteer
for this project.  You'd need to be (or be willing to become) a real
Haskell programmer, but wouldn't need to understand all the details of
darcs.  Part of the job (optimizing changes and annotate) could be done
bit-by-bit, which should make it a bit more tractable than would otherwise
be the case.  The only real trickiness that I see is in handling file
renames properly, and I can see at least two ways to handle that (which is
what makes it potentially tricky).
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net