[darcs-devel] announcing darcs 2.0.0pre1, the first prerelease for darcs 2

[Stefan O'Rear]

On Thu, Dec 13, 2007 at 07:12:45PM -0800, David Roundy wrote:
> Still on my todo list (of issues that you've reported):
> 
> 2. figuring out a nice way to speed up a lazy darcs get.  Currently it
>    grabs each file in the repository individually.  This means we're not
>    harmed by long history, but we suffer greatly in repositories having
>    many small files.  Note that these grabs are cached (if you enable a
>    cache) so a second get of the same (or a similar) repository would be
>    lightning fast.  But something should be done to (perhaps optionally)
>    speed up darcs gets.  Perhaps we could download a tarball of
>    _darcs/pristine.hashed with which to seed the cache (or our own
>    prisine.hashed).  We could do similarly with the patches directory, in
>    fact.  And in neither case would an "old" tarball harm us in any way
>    (except requiring that we grab a few more files).

My (incomplete) understanding is that the majority of the cost consists
of round trips (request -> responce, and TCP handshakes) - so just
adding HTTP/1.1 pipelining support to Darcs should give almost all of
the benefits of a tarball, without requiring a new repository format.
(Darcs' non-use of pipelining is also a frequent point of snickering, if
you care about such things).

Stefan
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