Dear Haskellers, Will you have a few spare hours this summer? The Darcs team needs your help! Summary ------- We need two volunteers to help us review the standalone hashed-storage module, which will be used by Darcs in the future. Background ---------- Darcs supports 'hashed' repositories in which each file in the pristine cache is associated with a cryptographic hash. Hashed repositories help Darcs to resist some forms of corruption and also allow for nice features such as a global patch cache and lazy patch fetching. Unfortunately, our implementation can be rather slow. Petr has some nice ideas for making these repositories work a lot faster. He will be producing a library he calls 'hashed-storage' which generalises the idea of storing files associating them with a cryptographic hash and furthermore improves on the current implementation used by Darcs. The hashed-storage library is general purpose and may find a use in other applications that need to manage a large number of files. I'm excited about this project because if it succeeds, we can finally start hammering home the point that yes, Darcs *can* be a fast revision control system. It may not fix all our problems -- we'll still need a Darcs 3 -- but it should alleviate at least some of the practical day to day issues. I want to ensure that Petr's project is a success. One thing in particular is that I would like him to get regular code review from the Haskell community, perhaps from folks who aren't already on the Darcs team. Do you think you can help? Two volunteers needed --------------------- I'm looking for just two volunteers this summer: 1. Do you have one hour per week this summer? We need somebody to track and make comments on changes to hashed-storage over this summer. The current library has only 8 modules, with less than 1400 lines of code, so it should be relatively easy to get started :-) 2. Do you have a spare weekend in August? Towards the end of the summer, it would be nice to have somebody examine the "final" version of hashed-storage and give us their thoughts. Again, no Darcs experience is needed, as this is a standalone module. In fact, a fresh perspective would be very helpful. More information ---------------- You can download hashed-storage from hackage from his darcs repository: darcs get http://repos.mornfall.net/hashed-storage For more information about his project, see http://web.mornfall.net/blog/summer_of_code.html Please get in touch with me if you can help. Thanks! Eric -- Eric Kow http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9