[darcs-users] "Done removing from pending:" then a VERY long wait.

[James Sleeman]

On 17/07/12 03:00, Owen Stephens wrote:

> So, what you're saying here is that you've created a bunch of new largish
> (~10MB) files, which contain mostly textual data, and when trying to 
> record a
> patch to add them, darcs seemingly hangs.

No, mostly a large quantity (4000 odd) of small files, with total 
combined size about 70 meg, most of the files are source code (html, 
php, css, javascript, sql...) with some binaries as well (images, 
flash...).

In order to not feed darcs with a 70 meg patch with thousands of files, 
I'm splitting it (just roughly, by sub-directories of the project which 
roughly equate to "modules" not that it's important) into separate 
patches which are from say 100k to somewhere under 10m in size.


> I'd bet there's some sort of pending patch that is causing a 
> complicated patch commutation to take place
> - which is giving the appearance of a hang.
Hmm.  Ok.  Lookng in _darcs/patches (of problem repo) there are a couple 
of pending files

-rw-rw-r-- 1 boffin boffin 12862703 Jul 17 12:10 pending
-rw-rw-r-- 1 boffin boffin 14707106 Jul 17 12:10 pending.tentative

So I did a raw copy of that repo ( cp -rp repo testrepo) and removed 
them (rm testrepo/_darcs/patches/pending*), and then tried the record, 
and... it was fast.

So I guess your theory is on the right track there.

Looking at the contents of pending, I perhaps looks like the result of 
doing darcs add on a larger set of the files but didn't immediately 
record, which I may have done at some stage before starting down this road.

So, perhaps I did darcs add on some large number of files, and then 
wanted to record some subset of those files (and possibly add some 
more), and that this has forced darcs to do a ton of work to try and 
commute pending?  If that's the case, some sort of a warning would be 
nice that if it's taking forever how they might be able to "fix" it (by 
nuking pending and recording smaller patches?).