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

[David Roundy]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2005 at 11:54:50PM +0100, Matthias Andree wrote:
> David Roundy <droundy at abridgegame.org> writes:
> 
> > True, I meant to say (although I *didn't* say) that there's no
> > fundamental limit on the number of patches in a repository.
> > Practically speaking, we've got a long way to go before you'll be happy
> > dealing with huge numbers of patches.
> 
> What is the current practical limit for an average machine, say some 2
> GHz clocked 32-bit CPU and 1/2 GB RAM?

It all depends how patient you are.  If you're sufficiently patient (and
have enough swap--darcs peaks at quite a bit of swap used, but is
reasonably swap-friendly, i.e. doesn't tend to thrash, even when using a
fair amount of swap) you should be able to handle the linux kernel
repository on your average machine.  Running darcs get will be very painful
(give it a day), and you won't want to even consider something like darcs
annotate (which also reads the entire repository), but for your every day
tasks of record and whatsnew it'll finish in perhaps fifteen seconds.

Pulls tend to be less efficient than get, so if you need to pull a lot of
patches simultaneously, that could be painful.  But if you're pulling less
than a hundred, you'll probably not find it too painful.  But it would be
better to hear from someone with big repositories and an average machine.
Mine is below average (700MHz PIII and 384M ram).
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net