[darcs-users] GSoC Project: Improving darcs' network performance

[Alexey Levan]

Hi all,

I've just finished my GSoC proposal, it's at http://bit.ly/info/9CKuRh .
I'd be glad to hear any feedback on it before deadline (19:00 UTC). (I'm
particularly interested in negative feedback, so I could identify and
fix the worst parts).

Also, there are some points I'm still unsure about; I'd appreciate for
any help on them:
  * What happened to HTTP pipelining? Why wasn't that successful? Is
problem in darcs, or in libs, or somewhere else? (Or nobody knows?) It
would be worth to write about it, as it intended to solve the same
problem as my project.
  * How my work would benefit the whole Haskell community? Surely, lot
of Haskell hackers use Darcs, and they'd be happy to see faster 'darcs
get'. What about others? What could I offer to them?
  * In description of 'darcs optimize --http' command, I'm saying that
patches before tag don't get reordered. Actually, I'm not 100% sure
about that. The idea I got while looking at sources is that tag is
regular patch (to some degree) that doesn't commute with anything.
However, I didn't find prove of it in sources, so I may be wrong. The
technical explanation of what's really going on with tags would be
really helpful.
  * At last, how will change of transfer-mode look like for users? From
developer perspective, I'm rewriting it, but maybe that would be better
positioned as extention to transfer-mode?

Thanks in advance!
--
Cheers, Alexey.