[tahoe-dev] Against DARCS - using the patch cache

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 12:20 AM, Brian Warner <warner at lothar.com> wrote:
>
> I am still disappointed by the
> speed of e.g. 'darcs whatsnew -l' and 'darcs diff',
...

By the way the darcs hackers have been working on the speed of
whatsnew, at least. Not sure about "darcs diff".

Looking at the darcs benchmarks [1], [2], I estimate that the upcoming
darcs 2.5 will do "wh -l" on a (pristine) Tahoe-LAFS source tree about
twice as fast as darcs 2.3 (which is the oldest darcs benchmarked,
although considerably newer than your darcs 2.1).

This isn't a reason for you to stop using git, of course.

> Popularity of the
> toolchain should never be the sole driver of technology choices (else
> we'd all be using CVS on windows), but there are hazards to being *too*
> far off the beaten path, and not being able to get darcs running on new
> platforms (because GHC is too hard to build) is one of them.

That reminds me that, aside from making programmers who like using git
happier, another important benefit of making Tahoe-LAFS source code
accessible through git is enabling buildslaves and Packager Work on
platforms that don't have darcs, such as Greg's NetBSD machine that
can't build GHC, and Ben's OpenBSD/sparc64:

http://tahoe-lafs.org/buildbot/builders/Ben%20OpenBSD-sparc64

If Greg and Ben wanted to operate buildslaves that automatically got
the latest version of Tahoe-LAFS through git, it would be a good step
forward for Tahoe-LAFS portability, packaging, and support.

Regards,

Zooko

[1] http://wiki.darcs.net/Benchmarks/Dewdrop#tahoe-lafs-1
[2] http://wiki.darcs.net/Benchmarks/Apricot#tahoe-lafs