Re: [Gnu-arch-users] patch: automatic cacherev and smarter get

[Alfred M\. Szmidt]

   > Caveats:
   > * the number 50 is hard coded; it really should be a value that
   > the user can customize.

   Before this is viable, it *must* be possible to turn this behaviour
   off. On large trees, cacherevs are massively wasteful of space;
   revision libraries are often a more efficient solution.

It depends.  If you have 50 small patches that fix typos or so, then
on a large tree this is wastefull.

I think a better heuristic on when to create a new cacherev is not on
the _number_ of patches that exist, but how big the collection of all
patches since the last cacherev is in bytes.

So if you have a tree that is 300MiB, and you fix a couple of
documents over 50 revisions, the total size of the patches might be as
low as 300KiB, but using the `number of patches' algorithm, you will
end up with a new cacherev that takes up 300.3MiB.  Not very smart.

Using the `total size of previous patches' you won't get a new
cacherev here, but you would get one if you have commited say 20MiB
worth of patches over a period.  This is far smarter, IMHO.