GSoC Report: Week 4

I have completed my phase of warm up issues which was oriented to allow me to get familiar with the Darcs system, specifically the cache part. I have sent the patches and they have been applied.

During the week I worked in finishing issue 1176, continued with the documentation part, more specifically describing in a higher level how a patch is fetch with a given hash, making easier for someone with a non-technical background understand what is happening, fixing a test which was failing in Windows when it shouldn't and finding out why the IO operations over hashedRepos were put in a different module.

For fixing issue 1176 I did some modifications over some code I had already sent which was about keeping the caches sorted by locality, the initial idea was that anything which was local should be first in the list and then the remote sources, but we realized that between the remotes also exist a "wanted" hierarchy, basically we would prefer to access first http repos over ssh, so the new sorting keeps all the locals first, http in the middle and ssh repos at the end. One of the problems this solve is that weird behaviour of darcs trying to establish a ssh connection when pulling from a http or local repository.


While I was working in the test which was failing we redefine what gets saved in the _darcs/prefs/sources, the global caches were one of those things, it wasn't necessary to have them there because that's why a global cache configuration file exist (~/.darcs/sources), so basically we just drop anything related with global caches before saving the sources file of a repository.


For the next week I will start to work in the problem of how to deal with the unused cache, the idea is by the end of the week to have a work plan and write a test case.

You can check out more of my progress in the wiki.