Re: [Monotone-devel] monotone dumb progress

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Thu, Mar 23, 2006 at 09:49:41AM +0100, address@hidden wrote:
> Cytowanie Nathaniel Smith <address@hidden>:
> 
> > Does it work for you?  Are you using mtndumb in real life?
> 
> Yes, it is very useful especially i don't have place to host my personal
> "mini-projects" via netsync, so i host them by mentioned "DWS" served by PHP
> script running at my unversity hosted site.

Yeah, exactly.  Another cool trick -- integrate this functionality
with monotone web front-ends :-).

> > Random question: what does it gain from using a RDBMS at all?
> > ... <cut>
> 
> This might be a good question, probably ... nothing. But ...
> 
> But my hosting provider (currently university) provides me hosting personal
> page with PHP/PostgreSQL support (and no safe, other than evil 0666 for
> fileswrite access to files) - a gain that made it interesting for me ... and
> maybe other students/worker of Tech Univ of Szczecin.
> 
> OTOH, writing native filesystem "driver" for this PHP site is trivial and will
> be done ASAP, probably before, first "release".

Ah, of course, permissions.  Makes sense.

> > > Anyone interested?
> > > I'll package results as soon as i'll find a time.
> >
> > Awesome!  Want to send us (me) a key, so you can just commit them to
> > the repo?
> Please:
> 
> [pubkey address@hidden
> MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQC7ixlgafREiQMbrpF8EUqm0BwmVycQhFlt
> YVx6YFByXUkGI8mdvghKxxatr2xuD+KQdfZzuNKN2AWDBBu8qMj1scEbeqttGx05VDU6kw/r
> STb6U8PA2difOMxq1aoi/V4lUBBouav0gZG8IKefIgCblLs2lNQvH9+rWZ/hZiQEawIDAQAB
> [end]

Should have push access to venge.net now.  (Remember you have to use
0.26pre.)

> Yes but it will one-two days, I must test it on unix (I developed mntdumb on
> win32), write NativeFS DWS implementation and write some doc, and ... go home
> compile 0.26 and well push it.

Pff, needing more testing is no reason not to push -- if you push
something that doesn't work, oh well, the total lack of the code
didn't work very well either :-).

> > There are a lot of other improvements to be made to the setup,
> > though :-).  The disk format could use some cleanup (the
> > locking/rollback isn't quite right, and I _think_ it is a win to
> > choose the merkle trie branching factor a little more
> > carefully/adaptively), it needs to use 'automate stdio' (0.26 puts the
> > necessary packet commands in 'automate', so this will be a huge speed
> > win), monotone needs to learn how to have epoch packets (a tiny point,
> > but useful for correctness) and to reference certs by some
> > user-visible id (this will be an even huger speed win), the SFTP and
> > HTTP support need to be faster (pipelining or something should be a
> > nice speed win, and ideally it should request multiple byte ranges all
> > at once for HTTP), it could do with FTP support at all, it would be
> > nice if it could run directly against a monotone db, just calculating
> > the necessary structures in memory rather than needing a local merkle
> > dir, the whole thing could use some tests...
> 
> Wow, long list.
> IN fact some of these things, are more and less tricky. As I'm not monotone
> internals/algorithms specialist, I can't do much in this area.
> But (S)FTP/HTTP optimizations are rather easy and i volunteer to care of them.
> There could be also a WebDAV writeable FS ... if anybody need it.

Right.  It's not a list of problems, it's a list of opportunities ;-).
Grab whatever looks fun... see whether you end up a monotone internals
expert by the end, the rest of us started with small stuff too ;-).

Good luck!

-- Nathaniel

-- 
Eternity is very long, especially towards the end.
  -- Woody Allen