[darcs-users] RE: [Haskell-cafe] fptools in darcs now available

David Roundy droundy at abridgegame.org
Tue May 3 18:32:08 UTC 2005


On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 03:46:27PM +0200, Daan Leijen wrote:
> Simon Marlow wrote:
> >Standing back a little - Daan points out that splitting the repo leads
> >to some difficulties, and having a single repo is conceptually simpler.
> >I agree, if (and only if) the "partial view" of a repo could be made to
> >work practically: that is, getting Happy (<3M of unpacked source) should
> >only result in getting the patches required.
> 
> Yes, you are right. I do think it is conceptually simpler to have single
> repo. At the same time I realize that practical considerations may not
> allow us to do this (right now). I hope that a darcs wizard can enlighten
> us about the short term feasability of "views".

In the short term, I don't think it's going to happen.  Most of the darcs
developers I'm aware of have other projects which are probably more
important (or don't have enough time).  On the other hand, if someone
*were* to volunteer to work on this, I don't think it'd take too long.  If
I could clone myself, and have one copy that only worked on "views" each
morning, I'd expect to finish it within a couple of months.  But it's
definitely a two-stage project since you'd first have to introduce the
cache of which patches affect which files and directories, and then modify
darcs to allow for missing files or directories, and to download only the
necesary patches.  Maybe three months.  It'd also need to be integrated
with the (embryonic) repository format infrastructure.

If a haskeller were to volunteer (and I don't think this'd be a project for
someone new to haskell), I'd be happy to give advice, and Ian would be
stuck reviewing the patches (since he's the darcs-unstable maintainter
now), but he's nice too, so that's all good.

This is a feature that doesn't itself greatly interest me, but some of the
side-effects (like optimizing annotate) would definitely be worthwhile.
-- 
David Roundy




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