[darcs-users] Re: Annotate doesn't recognize anything

[Alexander Staubo]

On 8/9/07, Matthew Palmer <mpalmer at hezmatt.org> wrote:
> Alexander Staubo wrote:
> > This is a partial repository, in case it matters. However, annotate is
> > supposed to work fine with partial repos.
>
> I think that's your problem.  I've just made my first partial repo, and
> annotate doesn't work right, with exactly the problem you've described.
> It's simple to reproduce (without needing trade secrets!):
[...]
> Since operations that need a patch which isn't available in the partial repo
> are documented to fail, I don't see it as a bug that annotate fails, but I
> certainly think the error message could be less confusing...

Thanks for clearing that up.

I'm surprised that Darcs does not fall back to the checkpoint to get
the patches it needs, though. Perhaps I am misunderstanding how
partial repos work, but the partial repo contains the last checkpoint,
which I believe contains the entire repo at checkpoint time as a
single patch -- so even though annotate will not be able to obtain
authorships for the lines beyond the checkpoint, in theory it should
still be able to do annotations from the checkpoint patch and onwards.

It surely can't be for performance reasons, given the following output
on a full repo:

$ time darcs annotate Rakefile >/dev/null

real    3m49.334s
user    2m25.953s
sys     0m5.616s

Alexander.