[darcs-users] optimising darcs annotate

[Petr Rockai]

Hi,

Ganesh Sittampalam <ganesh at earth.li> writes:
>> I'll repeat what I mentioned above:  it's faster and better to refer
>> to patches by hash than by number.  It takes a bit more space, but
>> that shouldn't be a significant downside, and the upside is that you
>> have easy O(1) lookup of patch name and contents, and potentially a
>> human-readable database (assuming the humans don't mind grubbing
>> around in _darcs/patches/).
>
> The hashes are far bigger than a 32-bit int, so it'll be a lot more space 
> (proportionately), which I think would be enough to matter on large repos 
> with large patches. I would also expect it to be significantly slower to 
> read the larger file, which I would expect to outweigh the time cost of 
> looking up the numbers later.
I'd just like to point out that the HashedIO hashes of patches *will* change
upon commutation, so in case you use them, you have to arrange for writeout of
a commuted patch to invalidate the cache, or you will miss relevant patches
upon a later annotate.

Yours,
   Petr.

-- 
Peter Rockai | me()mornfall!net | prockai()redhat!com
 http://blog.mornfall.net | http://web.mornfall.net

"In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be
 indented six feet downward and covered with dirt."
     -- Blair P. Houghton on the subject of C program indentation