[darcs-users] Re: darcs and patches@ mail

Sean E. Russell ser at germane-software.com
Sun Feb 15 20:10:11 UTC 2004


On Sunday 15 February 2004 10:50, Aggelos Economopoulos wrote:
> Obviously, I claim you could get better performance, but I think
> you'll agree with me that whether it is worth it or not can only be
> answered by implementing it and comparing actual measurements.

By "worth it", I meant "worth implementing," and, yes, I agree that you'll 
only discover whether it was worth it or not by actually doing it.  By the 
same logic, I can only discover whether I'll die by getting hit by a truck by 
actually trying it.  That's why we make educated guesses about these 
things :-)

But really, where it wouldn't be worth it would be in the TCO.  Maintaining a 
custom database; rewriting it to keep up with changes to the basic darcs 
architecture; discovering, later, that your custom implementation doesn't 
scale as well as you thought and having to re-implement the entire thing... 
these are the reasons why people use general-purpose databases, rather than 
hand-rolling their own every time.

> > ReiserFS4-land; have you?  If so, what are your impressions?  (replies
...
> You really should check out the code.

I've been meaning to; only, the folks who built my laptop installed it onto 
one huge EXT3 partition (curse them!), and I haven't taken the time to resize 
and repartition it yet to get a decent filesystem on the thing.  Also, I'm 
willing to take certain risks with my software, but I'm rather unwilling to 
tempt fate with my data on that scale.  Even Hans offers copious warnings 
about RFS4, and although he's probably being alarmist on purpose, I'm 
scared. ;-)

> Furthermore, until it becomes the standard in most installations (and I
> doubt it ever will), depending on it would seriously reduce the number
> of potential users for your program. Let alone the fact that there are

Oh, definitely.  I think depending on it is a bad idea, but taking advantage 
of it isn't.

A filesystem is just a database, and (personally) I like systems with 
filesystem based DBs -- like maildir, darcs, etc.  Not for everything, but I 
think that it is a good solution; it is transparent, low-maintenance, 
ubiquitous, and it works.  It should be replaced only when you've got a good 
idea that changing the database will yield significant benefits.  I'm not a 
DB guru, so I don't know if darcs would, but I sort of doubt that it would 
improve performance much.

Like they say; don't optimize randomly.  Find the bottlenecks first, and 
optimize those.  Do we have any indication that the filesystem is a 
bottleneck for darcs?

-- 
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