[darcs-users] code reviewers wanted for hashed-storage (darcs)

[Eric Kow]

Dear Haskellers,

Will you have a few spare hours this summer?
The Darcs team needs your help!

Summary
-------
We need two volunteers to help us review the standalone hashed-storage
module, which will be used by Darcs in the future.

Background
----------
Darcs supports 'hashed' repositories in which each file in the pristine
cache is associated with a cryptographic hash.  Hashed repositories help
Darcs to resist some forms of corruption and also allow for nice
features such as a global patch cache and lazy patch fetching.
Unfortunately, our implementation can be rather slow.

Petr has some nice ideas for making these repositories work a lot
faster.  He will be producing a library he calls 'hashed-storage' which
generalises the idea of storing files associating them with a
cryptographic hash and furthermore improves on the current
implementation used by Darcs.  The hashed-storage library is general
purpose and may find a use in other applications that need to manage a
large number of files.

I'm excited about this project because if it succeeds, we can finally
start hammering home the point that yes, Darcs *can* be a fast revision
control system.  It may not fix all our problems -- we'll still need a
Darcs 3 -- but it should alleviate at least some of the practical day to
day issues.

I want to ensure that Petr's project is a success.  One thing in
particular is that I would like him to get regular code review from the
Haskell community, perhaps from folks who aren't already on the Darcs
team.  Do you think you can help?

Two volunteers needed
---------------------
I'm looking for just two volunteers this summer:

1. Do you have one hour per week this summer?

   We need somebody to track and make comments on changes to
   hashed-storage over this summer.  The current library has only 8
   modules, with less than 1400 lines of code, so it should be
   relatively easy to get started :-)

2. Do you have a spare weekend in August?

   Towards the end of the summer, it would be nice to have somebody
   examine the "final" version of hashed-storage and give us their
   thoughts.

Again, no Darcs experience is needed, as this is a standalone module.
In fact, a fresh perspective would be very helpful.

More information
----------------
You can download hashed-storage from hackage from his darcs repository:
  darcs get http://repos.mornfall.net/hashed-storage
For more information about his project, see
  http://web.mornfall.net/blog/summer_of_code.html

Please get in touch with me if you can help.

Thanks!

Eric

-- 
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9
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