Developers' Blogs: voroskoi

mutt-ng: This night i could not sleep, so i started to create a patchset for mutt-devel. I took over the maintainership of mutt-ng from janny and the old patches did not apply to mutt 1.5.16. That's why i started this all.
So i cloned the mutt repo and created a patchset repo using the Mq extension for hg. Awesome tool, really. You can reach the result here. That is a hg repository actually, but you can apply the patches using quilt as well. There is not too much patch there yet, let me know if you miss something important.

RCS: After my previous post i had some discussion with vmiklos. The winner will be git as i can see because of the speed. We'll see. But vmiklos already started to work on dg to make git more darcs-like Well, we haven't discussed this with other developers, so it's just an idea ATM.

The whole story starts with Linus' speech at google about git. It was interesting to me how performance addict he is. Well, good for us. I also like the way he did the presentation. Very funny and very true in lot of cases.
I've also watched Bryan O'Sullivan's speech. He actually said a few words about darcs too
First of all i do not want to blame darcs. I just got a few problems with it and those problems getting more serious with time.

1. As you probably know we use darcs for frugalware repo itself. ATM there are more than 25k patches in the tree since 0.2 when we started using it. That is 25k patch in two years. It's quite a lot. And darcs getting slower because of the lot of patch. Now when i do a darcs what . on a partial(!) repo it takes about 20 sec. Huh? Actually i've noticed that i always have to wait because of darcs

2. Darcs changes: We create the changelogs from darcs history. Quite logical as this is one thing why you start using RCS to keep track your changes. Every time i push a package the worst part is the changelog generation. I talk about minutes sometimes.

3. Web interface: Sometimes i want to see why we added/removed a patch. Because of the partial repo this is unavailable for me, so i try to get the history from the web. History is quite slow. Well, much better than commitdiff. Just try to get a commitdiff from the web interface. Beside pumping helicon's load to >4 you will get no result. Just stop it after a few minutes.

These are my biggest problems with darcs. Sadly both of them performance related. Sometimes i have to re-get the repo because it collapses, but thanks to the --partial option it's not that big deal.

Here comes the part why i can not switch:

1. I am not the project leader of frugalware. Sad but true. We (that means vmiklos most the time )have created the infrastructure around darcs, it would be hard to change. (But i am almost sure we will sooner or later.) Darcs was the best one at the time vmiklos choose it, but a few things changed since then.

2. IMO there is two choice. Git or mercurial. Actually git is not that user friendly tool, especially compared to darcs. Mercurial is very similar to darcs in most cases, so i think that would be the one for us, but it is not interactive. When you use darcs you can pull the changes one by one (actually we do not need this) and you can record, push, see them one by one. And this is very useful. If you got pending changes you just store them in the repo without recording them, they will not hurt you at all. There is hg commit [FILE] which is OK most the time.

3. Yesterday i have tried to convert our darcs repo to mercurial using Tailor, but i had no luck. My comp has slow down and then it stopped accidentally. It might work on newer machines, but not sure and we do not want to loose our changes obviously.

Good news: There is a notify extension, and a CIA wrapper too, thanks to Brendan Cully so we do not have to start from the beginning. Also mercurial has its own web interface. Not a fancy one, but fast.

Until i am unable to convert the darcs repo to mercurial there is nothing to talk about as i can not measure the speed difference.

Another problem is that these issues only affect the frugalware trees. The others are too small to feel any real difference and darcs is too handy to just throw it away. We will see.