[Haskell-cafe] announcing darcs 2.0.0pre2

[David Roundy]

I am pleased to announce the availability of the second prerelease of darcs
two, darcs 2.0.0pre2.  This release fixes several severe performance bugs
that were present in the first prerelease.  These issues were identified
and fixed thanks to the helpful testing of Simon Marlow and Peter Rockai.
We also added support for compilation under ghc 6.4, so even more users
should be able to test this release.

As before, some information about the prerelease is available at:

http://wiki.darcs.net/index.html/DarcsTwo

You can either use darcs to grab the latest darcs, or you can download a
tarball at:

http://darcs.net/darcs2.0.0pre2.tar.gz

A few outstanding performance issues are:

1. darcs whatsnew performance has dropped for hashed repositories due to no
   longer tracking file-modification times.  We need to reenable this
   feature, but it's not quite clear how best to do so.

2. darcs get on a hashed repository is not as fast as the older darcs get
   --partial.  We could fix this by enabling the downloading of a single
   file _darcs/pristine.hashed.tar.gz.  This eliminates the potential
   benefits of caching file downloads on darcs get (currently a second
   "get" of the same remote repository is almost free if you've enabled a
   global cache), so we may want to make this behavior optional.

I hope we can get even more testing with this release, and look forward to
finding and fixing any remaining performance regressions (or bugs, of
course)!

David