[darcs-users] darcs 2.3 beta 1

[Simon Marlow]

On 24/06/2009 10:21, Petr Rockai wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I'd like to announce immediate availability of a first beta release of darcs
> 2.3. There is a number of improvements and bugfixes over the last stable
> release (2.2). Moreover, work has been done on performance of "darcs whatsnew"
> for large repositories. This has also introduced a slight risk of regressions,
> but please note, that all of the disruptive changes are in read-only code
> paths: the new code will never touch your repository, so it is unable to cause
> permanent harm. The worst that could happen is that you get no or bad diff from
> "darcs whatsnew". (This is also a reason why we need your testing!)
>
> There is only a single installation package for this release of darcs:
> cabalised source. (Please note that the final version with also come with the
> legacy autoconf-based buildsystem, for the last time.)
>
> You can either download a tarball from
> <http://repos.mornfall.net/darcs/darcs-2.2.98.1.tar.gz>  and build manually (see
> the build instructions in README inside the tarball), or, alternatively, you
> can use cabal-install to obtain a copy (the beta release is now available on
> Hackage):
>
>          $ cabal update
>          $ cabal install darcs-beta

I tried this, and it worked!  Nice going.

Did a quick comparison between my installed 2.2.0 and 2.3-beta on my 
laptop, where I'm using hashed repositories.  On a GHC repository with 
lots of local changes, whatsnew went from 0.26 seconds to 0.22 seconds. 
  On a GHC testsuite repository with zero changes, whatsnew went from 
1.1s to 0.06 seconds (cool!).

On this machine with hashed repositories I often suffer from the problem 
whereby darcs seems to randomly forget about timestamps, causing it to 
take ages in whatsnew and other operations.  So I take it this problem 
is partially fixed in 2.3?  Is there any way around it?

Cheers,
	Simon