Libraries in the repo

[Duncan Coutts]

On Fri, 2009-08-28 at 11:42 +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:

> Can anyone think of a good reason not to upgrade darcs to 2.3.0 on 
> darcs.haskell.org?  I can think of 3 reasons to do so:
> 
>   - this script, for preventing accidental divergence from upstream
>   - faster pushes, due to transfer-mode
>   - hide those annoying "Ignore-this: xxxxx" messages

By the way, people who regularly work with the ghc repos (at least on
Linux) and who are thinking of upgrading to darcs-2.3.0 should heed this
advice:

        Use "darcs get" to get your repos again. Not remotely, just
        locally. This switches them from darcs1 traditional format to
        darcs1 hashed format.
        
        If you do this, then "darcs whatsnew" gets ~4 times quicker.
        
        If you do not do this, then "darcs whatsnew" gets ~100 times
        slower.
        
All times measured on Linux, local ext3 filesystem, ghc testsuite repo.
All times are the second of two runs to allow for OS caching. The
results may well be quite different on a different file systems, like
Windows NTFS.

Perhaps someone can suggest a way of doing this using the ./darcs-all
script, that would not mess up what the default push/pull address is. Of
course doing a get means the copy doesn't have the changes from the
working directory. As far as I know darcs currently does not provide a
way to do an inplace upgrade to the faster format.

I've emailed the darcs list to raise this issue, that:
     1. we get no warning or advice from darcs that we should switch
        format
     2. that there is not a really convenient way of doing the switch

Duncan