[darcs-users] can we remove --no-pristine-tree?

[Max Battcher]

Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
>> In that case I'd just have normal repos on the web server, but another
>> option would be to use a "smart" server that utilizes "darcs show
>> contents" and "darcs show files".
> 
> Am I the only person to have a restrictive quota on my web server?

Quite possibly...  restrictive user quotas < 1GB seem to be a dying 
breed.  ...and you can run your own virtual server for a handful of 
dollars a month, with nearly full root control.

Maybe someone soon-ish (possibly me?) will even put together a cheap 
dedicated darcs repository host where very few if any projects will need 
to worry about repository size quotas...  (That reminds me: I have some 
survey questions I've been meaning to post...)

> No-pristine-tree repos are designed to have all the good features of normal
> repos, but to use less space.  None of the suggested alternatives do that.

Actually, for hashed and darcs-2 formats --no-pristine-tree repos would 
be severely crippled: darcs now grabs the pristine first to ASAP get a 
view of the current/head state of the repository and then it lazily 
fetches patches to back-fill the patch history.  This provides 
significant performance boosts, among other benefits...

The new pristine.hashed format is much more space efficient than old 
pristine trees (as it can share hard-link copies amongst repositories as 
darcs has long shared patch files in that manner).  Combined with 
--no-working-directory I believe that a hashed or darcs-2 format repo is 
going to use a bit less space than even --no-pristine-tree saved, at 
least in the case of many related repositories, with the added bonus 
that you don't have the performance loss of trying to recreate the 
pristine trees (nearly) every operation.  So it should be great/amazing 
for push-only repositories.

--
--Max Battcher--
http://worldmaker.net