[darcs-users] [OT] Larry McVoy on the Bitkeeper licence

[Nimrod A. Abing]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 18:02:58 +0100, Juliusz Chroboczek
<jch at pps.jussieu.fr> wrote:
> Assuming the metadata is 500 bytes per patch, 50 patches a day, that's
> slightly over 5 megabytes of metadata a year.  So the original poster
> should reach that limit after a mere 200 years of continuous work.  I
> would move to a different project after a century or so.

Whoah! I doubt I would be so (un)lucky to live that long :)

Thanks for clearing up this issue. It helps a lot to not have to worry
about hitting an artificial limit after a short period of time
committing thousands of patches (like that *other* SCM we are talking
about).

> (Well, there is one issue people should be aware of.  Darcs likes to
> keep all patches in a single directory, so they really should use
> filesystems that have O(n log n) directory access time.  Reiserfs, XFS
> and JFS good, Ext2, FFS, UFS and FAT bad.  Ext3 depends on the phase
> of the moon, NTFS is not documented.)

I've had a very bad experience with ReiserFS 3. Power went out on me
one day and all my little files vanished, some were truncated to zero
length. It seems the outage was timed perfectly when the system was
flushing its data to disk. I have never had that kind of experience
with EXT3, even when I turned the power off (pulled the plug) while
the system was writing data. Access speed is less of an issue for me
than reliability. I haven't tried Reiser4 though.
-- 
_nimrod_a_abing_