Saturday, January 31, 2009

darcs weekly news #15

News and discussions

  1. Petr Ročkai is working on a new Storage.Hashed module, a cleaner and more performant replacement for SlurpDirectory, hopefully allowing noticeably faster diff-related commands:
  2. Buildbots are being adapted as part of the switch to Cabal that will occur in the next major release of darcs:
  3. Using gitit + darcs backend as a new wiki for darcs.net ? Discussion and experiments are going on:

Issues resolved in the last week (3)

issue1310 Trent W. Buck
issue1313 Trent W. Buck
issue1333 Petr Rockai

Patches applied in the last week (22)

See text entry for details.

Friday, January 23, 2009

darcs weekly news #14

News and discussions

  1. Darcs backend for Gitit. Have a wiki? Thanks to Gwern Branwern, you can now store the it in a darcs repository, change history and all.
  2. Darcs 2.2.0 released, with better Windows support, performance and libdarcs. Release Manager Petr Ročkai has done a great job smoothly rolling out this release. More news on 2.2.1 shortly.
  3. Patch-tag.com . Thomas Hartman has announced patch-tag.com, a darcs hosting site built on top of a Haskell stack. Patch-tag is free for open source projects. For private repositories, free trial hosting is available until April 2009 (prices to be announced soon).

The backlog

Things you have missed since the last darcs weekly news

  1. zlib plans - Ganesh Sittampalam and Petr Ročkai have worked out "roadmap for migrating darcs over to the Haskell zlib library and dropping the direct C bindings completely" and fixing the any broken CRC errors in the process
  2. Benchmark results. Here are the recent results from the Standard Darcs Benchmarks. Thanks also to Nathan Gray for additional real world testing. What can /you/ do to make darcs faster?
  3. Thorkil Naur (Issue Manager) has outlined some thoughts for running the darcs issue tracker efficiently. Thanks, Thorkil!
  4. HLint report for darcs. Neil Mitchell has set his HLint tool to work, producing lots of helpful advice to improve our coding style. Try HLint today!
  5. TortoiseDarcs is back! Kari Hoijarvi has dusted off the TortoiseDarcs (a Windows GUI). His new version (2.0.1) works with both darcs 1 and 2.
  6. vc-darcs.el version 1.9. Juliusz Chroboczek has released version 1.9 of vc-darcs, with support for Emacs 22 and darcs 2
  7. Focal: towards a conflict-free revision control system. Jean-Philippe Bernardy and students propose a new theory of patches with no conflicting patches! Instead, the internal representation for state is carefully chosen so that conflicting situations can co-exist. They have also produced a toy implementation that you can play with

Issues resolved in the last week (1)

issue1292 Judah Jacobson

Patches applied in the last week (16)

See text entry for details.

Friday, January 16, 2009

darcs 2.2.0 is released!

what's new?

Here are four notable changes since the last release. In short, darcs is a bit faster and works better under Windows:
  • Improvements in Windows support.
  • Performance improvements in darcs repair and robustness improvements in darcs check.
  • First stab at libdarcs — when building through Cabal, all of darcs implementation is now exposed in modules. No API guarantees whatsoever.
  • Low-level optimisations in string handling and filesystem code.
There's a couple of cool new features and some bug fixes, 18 issues resolved overall. Please see the release announcement for more details.

what comes next?

The next major release is scheduled for this July (that's 2009-07), with some nice performance enhancements in store.

The darcs team has been infected with the benchmarking and hackathon habits. In our first darcs hacking sprint last October, we saw some interesting work on some long term improvements: a filename-to-patch cache to look patches up faster, and a notion of "packs" to reduce the effect of latency fetching files and patches over a network. We hope to continue this work in second hacking sprint and up to our next release.

Meanwhile, we may also be hosting a performance hacking contest to see what kinds of cool optimisations the darcs and Haskell communities can come up with.

In short, we'll be having a lot of fun making darcs faster for July. We hope you'll like the results!

Sunday, January 4, 2009

darcs 2.2.0pre2 ready for testing!

Release Manager Petr Ročkai has announced the second pre-release of darcs 2.2.0. There are two versions you can grab:
  • the official version, using the traditional configure, make, make install infrastructure:
    http://repos.mornfall.net/darcs/darcs-2.2.0pre2.tar.gz
  • and a more experimental cabalised version:
    http://repos.mornfall.net/darcs/darcs-2.1.98.2.tar.gz
More details in the announcement!

(P.S. the darcs team is still recruiting for a Darcs Weekly News editor)

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