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

[David Roundy]

On Fri, Feb 18, 2005 at 12:29:00PM +0100, Matthias Andree wrote:
> David Roundy <droundy at abridgegame.org> writes:
> > avoid holding it in memory.  Even for the linux kernel, the contents of the
> > complete patch inventory are pretty darn small (only 26k patches or so).
> > So I figure it's better to hold in memory than to reread from file (or
> > worse, from network).
> 
> Stupid question: why does the application have to care for holding the
> stuff in memory, rather than the operating system's buffer or cache?

I just mean we parse it and store the parsed information.  Parsing does
take some time, and that (plus the file or network IO) is what we want to
avoid repeating, but of course for sufficiently large repositories (or
sufficiently small memory present) you'd rather throw away the parsed
result as you use it and then reparse later.  It's a tradeoff between
memory and time behavior, and darcs right now optimizes on time in this
instance.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net