[darcs-users] Request for early user feedback on patch index darcs

Ben Franksen benjamin.franksen at bessy.de
Sun Jul 22 23:40:33 UTC 2012


Ben Franksen wrote:
> Aditya wrote:
>>  One of the concerns I already have is automatic creation of patch index
>>  on
>> existing repositories. The time it takes to create patch index increases
>> dramatically based on buffer
>> cache<http://oss.sgi.com/LDP/LDP/sag/buffer-cache.html>.
>> Creating a patch index just after get takes 6 sec, whereas it takes 1min
>> after cleaning the cache(This is for darcs development repo). This
>> suggests that a user could experience a potentially large delay on
>> changes/record/.. .
> 
> I share your concern. Creating the patch index for a whole repo in one go
> will certainly take a long time for large repositories. So, to overcome
> this problem, I would propose to create the index incrementally. The idea
> is that the index caches what the darcs command finds out, letting the
> index grow over time and use (explicit optimize --patch-index
> notwithstanding). No long extra delays for get, and the extra time to
> cache the information into the index would probably be negligable. For
> darcs init, it makes sense to always start with an index, and update the
> index on each record or pull.

BTW, darcs could also incrementally build acache of the patch dependencies 
in much the same manner, i.e. a little pice of work each time a command is 
run that does the work (of determining whether two patches commute) anyway, 
the result is cached.

Cheers
Ben



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