[darcs-users] Warning before adding huge file?

David Roundy droundy at abridgegame.org
Sun Mar 13 13:39:14 UTC 2005


On Sun, Mar 13, 2005 at 12:30:40AM -0600, Andrew Wagner wrote:
> I just had a patch record that made my G5 crank for a whole minute.  
> The patch added files, moved a couple other files, and re-named a 
> directory with a few files in it.  No file merging.  This included one 
> three hundred meg file, all of the others were only a couple megs each, 
> and maybe ten of them.
> 
> What is the most likely cause of this?

Darcs isn't very efficient in its handling of binary files.  Everything
scales right (O(N)), which sometimes makes this faster than text files,
where the diff can be O(N^2), but darcs stores the binary files in hex, and
the conversions back and forth between hex and binary aren't well
optimized.  It probably isn't too hard to optimize, but hasn't ever been a
real priority.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net




More information about the darcs-users mailing list