[Haskell-cafe] poll: how can we help you contribute to darcs?

[Ketil Malde]

Ketil Malde <ketil at malde.org> writes:

> Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> writes:

>> It would be useful if some darcs 2 hackers, contributors could help the
>> ghc people evaluate if darcs 2 is still in the running. 

> This looks like a very easy and low-investement way to get involved.

...and now I feel I've done my part :-)

Anyway: I took the 'biolib' repo with 2005 patches, and made three
copies, here's the timing results:

   darcs get ../biolib biolib-1  0.20s user 0.16s system 100% cpu 0.360 total
   darcs get --hashed ../biolib biolib-h  0.64s user 0.17s system 98% cpu 0.813 total
   darcs convert ../biolib biolib-2  0.62s user 0.18s system 7% cpu 11.101 total

(The 11 seconds in the last one is me typing in "I understand the
consequences of my action".  The warnings are almost scary enough for
me to worry about the state of my source repo, but I trust it is safe
to do this and discard the new repos afterwards..)

The 'convert' printed something looking like a patch:

    merger 0.0 (
    hunk ./Bio/Alignment/AlignData.hs 5
    -module Bio.EditList.AlignData ( $
    +module Bio.Alignment.AlignData ( $
    hunk ./Bio/Alignment/AlignData.hs 3
    -{-# OPTIONS -fglasgow-exts #-}
    -
    -module Bio.EditList.AlignData ( $
    +module Bio.EditList.AlignData (
    )

and I'm not quite sure what this is about?

Anyway, I then proceeded to run various queries (what, changes, diff),
but apparently, this repo is way too small to actually show anything
useful, it all completes in about 0.05-0.2 seconds.  

The consequences of moving to the darcs-2 format are a bit unclear to
me. For instance, I'd like to keep my main (export) repo in darcs-1
format, in order to make it as accessible as possible (Ubuntu still
ships with darcs-1.0.9, and that's a fairly cutting edge
distribution.)  Can I convert my working repos to darcs-2?  Should I?
How about darcs-hashed?  In short, I'd like to see examples of
recommended migration strategies, and associated benefits.

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants