[darcs-users] darcs-repo -- cheap branches / immutable patches

Anthony Towns aj at azure.humbug.org.au
Mon Oct 25 17:28:30 UTC 2004


Hey all,

So, darcs-repo 0.3's up, at

	darcs get http://www.erisian.com.au/darcs/darcs-repo/mainline

It works with TAGs now and will create branches automatically, so it's a
bit more usable. The layout is basically:

	/etc/darcs-repo.conf
		repo "darcs-repo" = "/srv/darcs/darcs-repo"
		default-repo = "/srv/darcs/misc"

	/srv/darcs/darcs-repo/
		mainline/
			inventory
		hax0ring/
			inventory
			commute-patches/
				...
		patches/
			...

etc. Each patch is stored only once, even if it's commuted; so branches
are a lot cheaper than darcs usually is. The branches are managed using
a perl script rather than darcs itself, so you can't remove a patch once
you've committed it -- no unpull, unrecord or rerecord.

Unpacked trees aren't stored at all, either -- you need to use darcs
get/pull to get at the actual contents of the repository.

I think tags are handled correctly, by the simple expedient of never
breaking inventories. That means that the "inventory" file download can
be longer than it would be with darcs normally, but that you won't have
to download another few extra inventory files before you can work out
what patches you need to pull.

It should be possible to use tags to make the on disk stuff even cheaper,
but I'm not sure how worthwhile that actually is. Does anyone have any
projects with a few branches that they'd like to try this on to see
how it scales?

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj at humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
Don't assume I speak for anyone but myself. GPG signed mail preferred.

``[S]exual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.''
      -- US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (http://tinyurl.com/3kwod)
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