[darcs-users] Colin Walters blogs on Arch changesets vs Darcs

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

> Hmmmm.  This is interesting, in that it sounds a lot like one of Juliusz's
> ideas for spiffing up Current, which is to store hashes of all the files in
> _darcs/current, rather than the files themselves.  His idea was that we
> could then generate from patches the actual file contents, when needed
> (which could be more than a tad expensive).

Note that another variant -- no current at all --, is already
implemented, and you can play with it if you've got the unstable tree.
It's currently only useful for short histories, but it will become
more generally usable when I teach it to use checkpoints.

Right now, you convert by doing

  $ rm -r _darcs/current
  $ touch _darcs/current.none

and convert back with

  $ rm _darcs/current.none
  $ mkdir _darcs/current
  $ darcs repair

> I'm imagining the command being a flag to optimize: 
>     darcs optimize --from-hashed-current, or somesuch.

I'm thinking |darcs optimize --current=full|, |--current=none| or
|--current=hashed|.

> However, the idea has interesting promise for a (perhaps?) nice
> treatment of creating darcs patches from tarballs.

Very interesting point.  Basically, you're suggesting the notion of a
``proto-repository'', which needs combining with a repository in order
to be useful.

> tar zxvf darcs-hive-0.5.tar.gz
> cd darcs-hive-0.5
> ...hack, hack, hack...
> # (oops, now I realize I want to contribute back...)
> darcs optimize --from-hashed-tarball ../darcs-hive-0.5.tar.gz

Where does this get the full history from?

  $ cd darcs-hive-0.5
  $ darcs optimize --current=full
                   --sibling=http://www.abridgegame.org/repos/darcs

                                        Juliusz