Should this happen?

bash$ darcs annotate compiler/basicTypes/DataCon.lhs
Stack space overflow: current size 8388608 bytes.
Use `+RTS -Ksize' to increase it.

8M is quite a big stack.

It worked with 100M (albeit very slowly).

Simon

Simon: we should certainly avoid this happening if we can help it!  

In the meantime, you can use
  darcs changes -v --only-to-file compiler/basicTypes/DataCon.lhs
as a crude workaround.

Darcs people: I have reproduced this, including the +RTS -K100M workaround.

See also http://bugs.darcs.net/issue1017 for a stack overflow when doing
whatsnew on a large file.

I need a volunteer to boil this down into a minimal test case, if possible.  The
minimal test case may not actually be very practical for the darcs test suite,
because it may involve generating lots of patches to a single file.  Volunteer
should have a look at maybench (darcs get http://code.haskell.org/maybench )
because there is a darcs-benchmark tool which creates repositories automatically.

I'm working on optimizing annotate and changes, which should make both
faster and also fix this bug.

Benedikt

Hi Benedikt,

On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 09:51:22AM +0000, Benedikt Schmidt wrote:
> I'm working on optimizing annotate and changes, which should make
> both faster and also fix this bug.

Is this work now done?  Can we close this bug?

Update: no, this bug is still very much with us:

~/src/ghc$ time darcs annotate README
Stack space overflow: current size 8388608 bytes.
Use `+RTS -Ksize -RTS' to increase it.

real	4m49.721s
user	1m14.573s
sys	0m16.529s

This issue is marked "superseded by #1566", which looks as if it might 
be not far from landing. If that's not the case, an interim usability 
fix for this would be good - it's an easily encountered stack overflow 
that was reported two years ago and is still scaring new users away from 
darcs (heard from kmc on #haskell today). Is it feasible to guestimate 
the size of the annotate operation ahead of time and exit with a 
friendly warning instead of a run-time error ? If not, even printing a 
warning about this issue before attempting any annotate would cushion 
the blow.

Patch "annotate interim usability fix: print a warning about issue #1068" 
sent to patches@darcs.net.

Shouldn't happen with the new annotate anymore. Benedikt's improvements 
would still be useful, although not strictly necessary to fix this 
particular bug.