[darcs-users] Darcs get without hard links

[Tomasz Zielonka]

On Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 08:36:32AM -0500, David Roundy wrote:
> > BTW, was there some improvement in efficiency of using darcs over SSH?
> > For example, it would be nice if darcs required only one ssh connection
> > per operation. Would this be a good task for someone wanting to get back
> > on track with darcs development?
> 
> Recently, I think the only speedup was in the apply function (which does
> help).  A while back someone (Benedikt maybe?) implemented sftp support,
> which cuts down the number of ssh connections needed to be O(1).

That's nice. I'll try that out.

I couldn't compile darcs 1.0.4 out of the box, probably because of old
Cabal or something, but now I just removed the WASH package and the
problem disappeared.

> It would be nice to make it just require one connection, since then we
> wouldn't have to tell people to use ssh-agent.

Also, I am not sure sftp does any pipelining? I guess it does in the
batch mode.

I thought about creating a simple darcs-server. It would be an
additional (perhaps hidden) darcs command, that would make darcs
respond to requests on stdin/stdout. One kind of request would
be to get a list of files, the other would be to invoke a darcs
command.

The darcs which orignates the connection would have to handle
the case that the other darcs doesn't support the new protocol.

The other approach, which could remove this problem, is to write a shell
script that would be sent to the other side of ssh connection and
executed there. This is an idea taken from shfs.

But I feel that I am missing an even simpler possibility...

I am sorry I didn't comment on the rest of your message yet. Got to get
back to work now.

Best regards
Tomasz