[darcs-users] optimising darcs annotate

[David Roundy]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 11:23 PM, Petr Rockai <me at mornfall.net> wrote:
> 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.

Yes, as with all caches, yes, the cache will need to be kept coherent.
 This is independent of how we refer to patches.

David