Abstract

My project will make “darcs changes” and “darcs annotate” take advantage of a new optimisation called patch index.

About the project

“darcs changes [FILE]” is used to list the patches that effected the given files or directories. “darcs annotate [FILE]” is used to find the patch that last modified each line in that file.

However getting the relevant patches in darcs changes and darcs annotate is slow, as it goes through every patch back until file creation.

I seek to solve these issues in my project.

Benefits to the community

Darcs is one of the most used VCS in haskell projects. However, “darcs changes”, and “darcs annotate” get unacceptably slow as the project grows. For example, in darcs repository of darcs itself, it takes 45 minutes for a “darcs changes Apply.hs” to finish.

My project will benefit the wider haskell community by speeding up some of the slowest parts of darcs. Indeed patch index was designed to speed up commands like changes and annotate.

Project Design

Patch Index is a way designed by Benedikt Schmidt, to directly access all patches in a repo that affect a file.

Patch index uses a map (Map FileId (Set PatchId)) to identify the patches that go with a file. FileId is composed of creationName (name of the file when created), and a counter for differentiating files with same creationName.

FileId = FileId {creationName :: ByteString, counter :: Int} PatchesMap = Map FileId (Set PatchId)

Although a patch usually effects only a few files, “darcs changes” and “darcs annotate” parse every patch back till file creation.

I will implement a –patch-index argument to “darcs changes [FILE]” and “darcs annotate [FILE]”, so that they parse only the patches that touch the files.

Timeline

My summer break will begin before gsoc starting date, but my next semester will begin July last week. Accordingly I plan to start before actual start date (early May), and hopefully finish early as well.

Benedikt has ported code for creating, updating, and querying the patch index.

week 1: I will study Benedikt’s code, and look for approaches on modifying darcs changes to use patch index.

week 2 - 4: I will modify darcs changes to use patch index

week 5: I will study darcs annotate (with Petr’s improvements) and look for approaches on modifying darcs annotate.

week 6 - 8: I will modify darcs annotate to use patch index.

week 9 - 12: This time will be spent on polishing the code, as well as removing any leftover bugs, writing remaining tests and measuring performance improvements. At end date we should be able to realise the performance improvements.

About Me

I am sophomore undergraduate student in India. I have taught myself functional programming one and a half years ago and haskell one year ago. I mostly use haskell in programming contests and online judges. I have also coded an AI bot in haskell for Google AI Contest 2010. Although I have been using open source software since 7 years, I have never actually contributed back to them. I think GSoC is going to be a wonderful start for me in open source contribution. I will also be able to improve my skills as a developer.