GSoC Week 12

Wow, this is my last gsoc related entry, I'm publishing earlier because I won't be around during the weekend.

I mentioned last week that we had know a better mechanism to handle bad cache, during this week I worked mainly adding documentation, extending user manual and finally sending the patch to set the environment variable DARCS_CONNECTION_TIMEOUT.

Overall my experience with the people from Darcs was really good, giving that this was my first experience contributing to an open source project, sometimes I had moments when I felt really awkward, but my mentor and the rest of people on irc will kindly help me to understand the stuff I didn't know.

With Eric (my mentor) things went pretty neat, We would meet weekly and discuss about what I had done during the previous week, what I accomplished, my doubts, and what I would work next. He always tried to keep a culture of get things done, and at the beginning when I wasn't very familiar with Darcs he would help me to get more familiar doing some "quiz" questions, which would take me to an "aha!" moment and finding some answer by myself.

What's next ? I plan to continue contributing with Darcs, for me the most difficult part in an open source project is getting started, I think I have passed through that, and I want to keep the momentum, I will try to keep contributing as much as I can.

I would also like to say thanks to the following people on irc who somehow help me when I appeared there asking questions: kowey, mornfall, lispy, Heffalump, sm.

Thanks to the Darcs team and I hope to continue having fun and learning lots with you.

All the documentation of my project is in the wiki.

GSoC Week 11

In my last entry I mentioned I had already sent a patch, which would allow Darcs to have a better handling of bad caches, I'm happy to announce that my patch is now in the current head :).

Now we have a better handling of bad entries in the cache, some of the main benefits of this fix is that some operations that would take more than 10 minutes were now reduced to less than 1 minute, the time changes depending the number of patches in the repository( look my report of week 8 for a better idea of what was happening).

Also I mentioned I was having some issues trying to use the timeout function from System.Timeout in Windows, I wrote to haskell-cafe and someone claimed that It would work for him in Windows 7, and then other person claim the same behaviour I was having with Windows XP, then I tried in a friend's computer, and it'd work intermittently, so the conclusion is that this is a Windows systems related issue and not a GHC's as I though at the beginning, I would really appreciate if someone with more experience with Haskell and Windows systems could point out what is really happening.

For the coming week, I would focus on extending the documentation, sending my implementation for the timeout flag, and completing the section "Future work" in the high level document.