[darcs-users] Cheap branches (was: Re: post-1.0: "isolated directories"?)

David Roundy droundy at abridgegame.org
Tue Oct 26 12:31:03 UTC 2004


On Wed, Oct 20, 2004 at 02:33:37AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 04:41:49AM -0400, David Roundy wrote:
> > Yeah.  In practice, you don't want to break your inventory into the
> > smallest pieces, since there's an overhead for each file that is
> > downloaded.  
> 
> Hrm. But there's nothing saying I /have/ to break the inventory up is
> there?  I could, eg, have the inventory up to TAG_3, TAG_3's inventory up
> to TAG_2, TAG_2's to TAG_1, and everything from TAG_1 to "darcs init"; but
> when I'm asked for TAG_3's inventory I could just merge them all myself.

Right.

> > Especially if there are lots of tags, breaking everywhere that
> > is possible could be very bad, giving almost as many inventory files as
> > patches.  Ideally, your cgi script (or the darcs-repo script it calls)
> > should be smart enough to return just two or three inventory files, since
> > normally you only need the first one, and if you need more than that, quite
> > likely you need the entire inventory.  But that's an optimization.
> 
> In which case the idea would be *store* the tag inventories in little
> tiny bits; but *send* them as bigger chunks. Which I can do, because
> I'm translating my "scp" to a script invocation.

Yes, although figuring out what bigger chunks to send could be tricky.
Also, depending on your filesystem, you might want to not have tons of tiny
files.  On the third hand, if you don't want to have tons of tiny files,
darcs probably isn't the program for you...

> > Right, except that for real development I'd not get --partial.  I'd really
> > only recommend get --partial for either occasional develpment (e.g. someone
> > sending in doc patches for darcs) or read-only use (e.g. if you just want
> > to keep up with the latest darcs).  For real development, sooner or later
> > you'll want to do something requiring a full repo.  On the other hand, the
> > more people who use partial repos, the sooner the partial-repo-related bugs
> > will be found...
> 
> Interesting. I really can't see a lot of use for ancient history at all,
> personally; but then I've never really had it handy either. I do prefer
> to "create a new working directory; hack; commit" than keep long running
> development directories though so it might be a stylistic thing. Then
> again, maybe I'm just thinking of "0.1.1" as being a lot more ancient
> than it is for other things.

It's amazing how often one comes across what seem to be ancient bugs, when
one *does* have the history available.  At least, it amazes me.  More than
once, at work, I've been accused of introducing bugs, when on investigation
turned out to date way back to early in the CVS repository that we
converted to a darcs repo.  :) (In defense of my accusers, I *have*
introduced a lot of bugs into our code, so it's usually a good guess that
any given bug is my fault...)
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org
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