[darcs-users] TortoiseDarcs and Darcs 2 Hashed Repos

Grant Husbands grant.husbands at businesswebsoftware.com
Fri Oct 10 09:53:11 UTC 2008


David Roundy wrote (accidentally off-list):
 > No, but we don't store any other timestamp.  In that case, darcs will
 > have to go ahead and compare the actual file contents to see if
 > anything has changed.

Confirmed - I did some experiments and the modified times of the 
pristine files don't correspond in any way to the timestamps.

I'd say the current situation less than ideal for both darcs and 
TortoiseDarcs, as timestamp comparison offers a rapid way of (almost) 
knowing that a file hasn't changed. As TortoiseDarcs needs to do the 
comparison every time the user sees an in-repo file listing, I think 
this is a significant problem.

So I think that brings us back to a subset of the original question; 
could we modify Darcs so that it maintains a cached expected-timestamp 
for each file it knows about? We're willing to implement the solution, 
but some good hints as to an implementation strategy would be useful. 
Darcs 1 used to do the same (it would modify the modified-time for 
pristine files to match working ones).

Regards,
Grant.


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