[Haskell-cafe] Re: [darcs-devel] announcing darcs 2.0.0pre3

[David Roundy]

On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 03:26:51PM +0000, Simon Marlow wrote:
> David Roundy wrote:
> > We are happy to announce the third prerelease version of darcs 2! Darcs 2
> > features numerous improvements, and it seems that we have fixed most of the
> > regressions, so we're looking for help, from users willing to try this
> > release out. Read below, to see how you can benefit from this new release,
> > and how you can help us to make the final darcs 2 release the best ever!
> > 
> > The third prerelease features (apart from numerous bug and performance
> > regression fixes) a completely rewritten rollback command and new
> > progress-reporting functionality. If darcs takes more than a couple of
> > seconds for a given operation and provides you with no feedback as to what
> > it's up to, let us know, so we can fine-tune the progress-reporting output!
> 
> The progress reporting is fantastic!  It's worth upgrading to darcs2 just 
> for that :-)

Thanks! I've enjoyed it myself, actually...

> ... Although the progress reporting doesn't appear to work quite as well
> on darcs-1 repositories as it does on darcs-2 repositories - is that
> expected?

No, it's not really expected, but the progress reporting is rather hastily
thrown together, so it's not surprising, either.  Basically I first
converted the existing progress-reporting code (which reported getting
patches with darcs get, and applying them in a few other instances), and
then started throwing in progress annotations in other spots until my
couple of test commands and the ones I normally use seemed to be pretty
snappy (I'm not sure what the right word for a lack of delays in
progress-reporting).

> There are still times when I see nothing happening, for example in the 
> unpull test on the GHC repo (see previous messages), the last progress 
> message I get is
> 
> Reading patches in /64playpen/simonmar/ghc-darcs2 17040
> 
> and it sits there for 7-8 seconds before completing.  Does this maybe shed 
> any light on why this unpull is 2 times slower than darcs1?

Hmmm.  I'll take a look.  This is basically equivalent to something like

darcs obliterate --last 400 -a

I believe? The ghc repo definitely stresses different parts of darcs,
because of its large size (which means you often have the privilege of
reporting poor behavior).
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University