[darcs-users] Request for comments: GSoC proposal "Hashed Files and Cache"

[Ganesh Sittampalam]

Hi,

On 20/03/2014 06:32, Marcio Díaz wrote:
> Hi everyone, I've uploaded my proposal for the GSoC, you can see it here:
> 
> http://darcs.net/GSoC/2014-Hashed-Files-And-Cache
> 
> I would like to hear your comments.

Some random comments - though of course you should be skeptical of
feature creep so don't just add everything I suggest to your proposal :-)

- I really like the idea of "darcs undo". I think it might allow us to
remove some confirmation prompts from other operations.

- Will the bash scripts described in weeks 3+4 be integrated with the
darcs test suite? It's also important that we don't regress on this in
future.

- Are you also thinking about making individual repositories bucketed?
It raises bigger backwards compatibility problems (remote clients using
"darcs pull"/"darcs get" access the repo directly) but may be important
for big darcs repos. I suspect that we can actually defer this to a
future format migration.

- Will you be able to benchmark on multiple platforms? I've personally
experienced very poor performance when my cache directory grew large on
my Windows laptop and I suspect it was worse than one might expect on
Linux, so it's worth looking at this in different scenarios.

- I'm a little skeptical of the value of "darcs undelete", though it
does sound pretty cool in some ways.

- One thing I would really like and that is somewhat related is a "darcs
archive" command that would take an existing repository, check for local
changes (with or without boring files, at the user's choice) and local
patches that aren't in upstream (as defined by the user), and replace
the repository with a bundle file containing just those local patches +
an extra one with any local changes. Just mentioning it in case it fits
in with anything else you're doing, though it isn't directly about the
global cache.

- For "darcs optimize --global-cache" I would expect to give one or more
root folder (e.g. my home directory) and have it find all the darcs
repositories inside that folder.

Cheers,

Ganesh