[Haskell-cafe] Make your Darcs repositories hashed?

[Jason Dagit]

On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 3:06 PM, Brandon S Allbery KF8NH <allbery at ece.cmu.edu
> wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> On 10/9/10 08:30 , Christopher Done wrote:
> > Every Darcs repository I've pulled this year has always showed me this
> message:
> >
> >
> *******************************************************************************
> > Fetching a hashed repository would be faster.  Perhaps you could persuade
> > the maintainer to run darcs optimize --upgrade with darcs 2.4.0 or
> higher?
> >
> *******************************************************************************
>
> The problem with this message is that it knows that *you* have a darcs that
> can take advantage of it, but no way to know if other users of the
> repository can (or, for that matter, if the repository is managed by a
> capable version of darcs).
>

Welcome to the world of distributed computing :)  In general, you can't
really tell what others are doing with their copies of the repository.  It's
both good and bad.

Newer darcs clients are compatible with repos created with older darcs
clients and using the newer client will not interfere with using the older
clients on that repo.  In other words: It's safe to use the newer clients.
 So you can think of your repo as being managed by the latest stable release
if you like.

The Haskell.org server doesn't have to be upgraded. Maintainers can install
a newer darcs locally (cabal install darcs), do the upgrade locally and then
copy the repository back to the haskell.org server.  Or, if
haskell.orgservers upgrade their copy of darcs, or you install newer
darcs in your home
dir, you can do the upgrade in-pace.

Some things to keep in mind:
  * Darcs 2.4.4 is perfectly backwards compatible with older darcs and older
repos.
  * cabal install makes upgrading/installing darcs painfree.
  * Newer darcs has fewer bugs and the performance continues to improve as
well[1].

The over arching theme is:  It is safe to upgrade your darcs client and you
shoud upgrade your darcs client.

If you have specific questions or concerns, I'd recommend asking on the
darcs-users mailing list[2].

Thanks,
Jason

[1] If you poke around on this page following links you can get a feeling
for how performance changes between releases:
http://wiki.darcs.net/Benchmarks  2.4.4 is a solid release.
[2] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
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