[darcs-users] zlib plans
Ganesh Sittampalam
ganesh at earth.li
Wed Nov 26 19:01:52 UTC 2008
Hi,
At Eric's request I chatted to Petr about this, and I now propose the
following roadmap for migrating darcs over to the Haskell zlib library and
dropping the direct C bindings completely. Please note that I'm not
volunteering to do any of this work :-) Much/all of this has been
discussed or agreed, I'm really just making the sequencing explicit.
(1) ASAP, move the cabal default back to the C zlib, to mitigate the
current issues people are experiencing with corrupt checksums in .gz files
produced by old versions of darcs. This might make the situation on
Windows a bit worse, as the cabal build will become broken by default, but
this just sets our plans for "good support" for Windows back a bit,
whereas not doing it means a lot of trouble on all platforms.
(2) I understand that Haskell zlib 0.5.1 is planned, with an interface
that will return the "broken" decompressed data at the same time as
reporting CRC errors. When this appears:
(a) Make darcs use this interface to accept but warn about broken .gz
files. We wouldn't maintain support for zlib 0.5.0 - as with the
previous zlib transition, too much pain for too little gain.
(b) [probably needs to be simultaneous with (a)] Make darcs repair, or an
external program bundled with darcs, fix the corrupt checksums.
(c) [optional] At some point switch the handling of broken .gz files from
"accept but warn" to "reject". Obviously in both cases the
warning/error would be clear about how to fix the problem.
(3) Switch the default for everything to the Haskell zlib
(4) Drop the C zlib
(1) and (2) should happen as soon as possible. The precise timing of (3)
and (4) is a matter of judgement; IMO we should have confidence at each
step that we won't regret it, and this may mean waiting a few months each
time; others I think are more keen to dump cruft as quickly as possible.
BTW I haven't heard any suggestion that it's worth keeping the C zlib
long term. I'm not aware of anything it can do that the Haskell zlib
can't, and there's just no point in maintaining this inside darcs. If you
disagree please speak up!
Cheers,
Ganesh
More information about the darcs-users
mailing list