[darcs-users] hashed-storage work now merged in (woo!)

[Thomas Hartman]

applause!

2009/10/8 Eric Kow <kowey at darcs.net>:
> Hi everybody,
>
> So you may have noticed me saying this in a couple of recent threads.
> Petr Ročkai's hashed-storage work from his 2009 Google Summer of Code
> project has been merged!
>
> I thought I would take a few moments to give everybody an overview of
> how this work benefits us, and where we'll be going in the future.
>
> In a nutshell
> -------------
> What does this mean for you?  Faster repository-local operations.
>
> Hashed format repositories (with darcs-1 and darcs-2 patches alike)
> should now be faster to use on a daily basis.  We saw the very
> beginnings of this work in Darcs 2.3.0 with a faster darcs whatsnew.
> Now these speed improvements cover *all* repository-local operations.
>
> The next Darcs beta is a couple of months away, but before that,
> I would like to encourage you to try this out for yourself:
>
>  darcs get --lazy http://darcs.net
>  cd darcs.net
>  cabal install
>
> For best results, please run darcs optimize --upgrade followed by darcs
> optimize --pristine.  Pay attention over the next couple of weeks when
> you try a record, amend, revert, unrecord.  If we've done our work
> right, there should be nothing to see.  Darcs should be less noticeable,
> with fewer "Synchronizing pristine" messages and a faster return to the
> command prompt.  We think you'll like it.  But please get back to us.
> Is Darcs faster for you?
>
> If you're particularly interested, I will step through these changes in
> greater detail at the end of this message.  Meanwhile, I would like to
> step back a little and take stock of how these improvements fit in to
> the bigger picture.
>
> The road ahead
> --------------
> The hashed storage work is a big step forward and definitely a cause for
> celebration.  I think it is useful to reflect on this progress and
> consider how it fits in with our progress since darcs 1.0.9:
>
>  - ssh connection sharing (darcs transfer mode)
>  - HTTP pipelining
>  - lazy repositories
>  - the global cache
>
> and now
>
>  - index-based diffing
>  - hashed-storage efficiency
>
> We cannot promise that Darcs will magically become fast overnight.  But
> what we can and will do is continue chipping away at it, solving
> problems one at a time; release by release, a little bit better, a
> little bit faster every time until one day we can look back and marvel
> at all the progress we've made.
>
> So Petr's work makes Darcs easier to live with on a day-to-day basis.
> But that's not enough.  Now we need to turn our attention to that
> crucial first impression; what happens when people try Darcs out for the
> first time is that they darcs get a repository they want and... then...
> they... wait...
>
> This is embarrassing, but we can fix it.  In fact, we already have
> started working on the problem.  The next version of hashed-storage will
> likely introduce a notion of "packs" in which the many often very small
> files that Darcs keeps track of will be concatenated into more
> substantial "packs" that compress better and reduce the ill effects of
> latency.  My hope is that we will be able to complete the packs work by
> Darcs 2.5.
>
> There's a lot more progress to be made: smarter patch representations,
> tuning for large patches, file-to-patch caching for long histories.
> And that's just performance!  For more details about our performance
> work, please have a look at
>
>  http://tinyurl.com/darcs-performance2
>
> If you could do anything to help, benchmark, profile, anything at all,
> please let us know :-)
>
> The fight continues.
>
> Thank-you!
> ----------
> Petr and Ganesh deserve a huge round of applause.  Petr, thanks for
> thinking up this work, getting it done and pushing it through. Ganesh,
> thanks for an extremely thorough and thoughtful review.  The two of you,
> thanks for holding on, for tenacious cooperation in the face of
> adversity.
>
> Thanks also to all the wider Darcs community for all your support,
> comments, patch reviews.
>
> I'm looking forward to seeing you at the upcoming Darcs hacking sprint.
> The sprint will take place in Vienna, Austria on the weekend of 14-15
> November.  Everybody, especially Darcs and Haskell newbies, is welcome
> to join in.  Details on http://wiki.darcs.net/Sprints/2009-11
>
> And if I may take a paragraph to mention this, Darcs needs your support.
> Every little counts, if you can send patches, review patches, tweak
> documentation, profile, benchmark, submit bug reports.  Barring that,
> you could also make a contribution to our travel fund via the Software
> Freedom Conservancy.  See http://darcs.net/donations.html for details.
>
> Thanks everybody and enjoy!
>
> Eric
>
> Changes in detail
> -----------------
> - Darcs uses an "index" file to compute working directory and
>  pristine cache diffs.  This avoids timestamps going out of
>  synch when you have multiple local branches, which saves a
>  huge and needless slowdown.
>
> - Hashed storage is more efficient in general.  Even if you
>  already have perfect timestamps, the new optimisations should make
>  Darcs faster in general.
>
> - The new 'darcs optimize --pristine' reduces spurious mismatches
>  on directories.
>
> - Darcs no longer requires a one second sleep after applying patches.
>
> --
> Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
> PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
>
> iEYEARECAAYFAkrOFfwACgkQBUrOwgisBPnI5gCgjfnqlBm3W97nV2sceDwiVwII
> zxwAoNUH4M1nvlDTlPv9UnRoio4B3HWi
> =3kUn
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
> _______________________________________________
> darcs-users mailing list
> darcs-users at darcs.net
> http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
>
>