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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Ben Franksen writes:

 > Aditya writes
 > > back with optimize --patch-index. If you wish to disable patch index
 > > at creation, pass --no-patch-index. A lazy get will implicitly disable
 > > patch index, as you require to have all patches to create a patch
 > > index.

It seems to me this is guessing what the user wants.  The user might
prefer that the patch index be created.  I can see why you might make
that guess, but the user should at least be warned that this choice is
being made for her.  Perhaps which optimization to prefer could be a
configuration item ("to silence this warning, set prefer_optimization
to 'lazy,index'; to silently convert ignore lazy and always create the
patch index, set prefer_optimization to 'index,lazy'").

 > I cannot see a use case for optimize --no-patch-index, except for 
 > measurements or debugging; however, it doesn't hurt to have it, either.

For working around buggy index algorithms, of course.  Until the
technology is proven, there should be a way to avoid it.  It should be
documented as "temporary UI, to be removed" if that's the intention,
though.

 > The explicit optimize command has the advantage that I can let darcs do the 
 > work in the background, maybe even at night by a cron job when I don't care 
 > how long it takes.

Bingo.  Or, you know what?  You could even clone the repo and work
there while indexing.  In a distributed VCS, rarely-used operations
that take a long time just aren't anything to worry about.