[wxhaskell-users] please upgrade wxhaskell repository to darcs hashed

[Eric Y. K. <eri...@gm...>]

Dear wxHaskell hackers:

Fetching wxhaskell via darcs is currently a lot slower than it needs to
be because darcs is forced to (a) fetch every file and (b) perform an
on-the-fly conversion from an old-fashioned repo to a hashed repository.

I would like to convert this repository to the hashed format.  It will
still be using darcs-1 semantics so it will be a perfectly backward
compatible upgrade (if you have a darcs 2 client, you should still be
able to push to the same repository without noticing any changes).

Making this change will speed up the fetch in two ways:
- it will retrieve the pristine cache and patches without having to
  apply them (thanks to hashes, it can trust that your pristine cache
  is correct)
- it allows for lazy fetching via darcs get --lazy

This upgrade will require anybody fetching darcs to have a darcs 2
client, but I believe darcs 2 is now sufficiently widespread that you
can afford this.  Besides: haskellers can just do cabal install darcs.

To do this upgrade:

 darcs get --hashed /srv/code/wxhaskell wxhaskell.hashed
 cp -R wxhaskell.hashed/_darcs /srv/code/wxhaskell/_darcs-hashed
 cd /srv/code/wxhaskell
 cp _darcs/prefs/defaults _darcs-hashed/prefs
 mv _darcs _darcs-old
 mv _darcs-hashed _darcs
 rm -rf _darcs-old

Future versions of darcs will include a optimize --upgrade command
to simplify this procedure, but no need to hang around waiting :-)

What do you say?

-- 
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9