[darcs-users] Re: [BK] upgrade will be needed

[Patrick McFarland]

On Saturday 19 February 2005 12:53 pm, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> Wouldn't using the CVS format help an order of magnitude here? With
> CVS/SCCS format you can extract all the patchsets that affected a single
> file in a extremely efficient manner, memory utilization will be
> extremely low too (like in cvsps indeed). You'll only have to lookup the
> "global changeset file", and then open the few ,v files that are
> affected and extract their patchsets. cvsps does this optimally
> already. The only difference is that what cvsps is a "readonly" cache,
> while with a real SCM it would be a global file that control all the
> changesets in an atomic way.

But then that makes darcs do stuff the cvs way, and would make darcs exactly 
the opposite of how us darcs users want it, imho. If you're worried about 
darcs needing to open a billion files, nothing stops people from,  say, 
hacking darcs to use a SQL database to store patches in (they just have to 
code it, and I think I saw a SQL module for haskell around somewhere...)

May be I just don't understand the argument of why the CVS file format is 
anything short of insane, backwards, and outdated. We want each chunk of 
information to be both independent and have a clear history (ie, what patches 
does this patch rely on). CVS does not provide this, it is not fine grained 
enough for what darcs needs.

(David Roundy and Co can fill in the technical details of this, I'm not a 
versioning system expert)

In short, we need to move as far away from the CVS way of doing things, 
because ultimately its the wrong way. This is why I am somewhat dismayed when 
I hear of projects who move to SVN from CVS... SVN is just CVS with a few 
flaws fixed, and a few things like atomic commits added. It isn't the next 
step: it is just a small stepping stone between CVS and the next step.

-- 
Patrick "Diablo-D3" McFarland || pmcfarland at downeast.net
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd 
all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to
repetitive electronic music." -- Kristian Wilson, Nintendo, Inc, 1989
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