The filecache is our informal name for a cache mapping filenames to the patches
that affect them.

I'm creating a new ticket for this because I think it should stand independently
of the more general "improve darcs changes performance" (issue124) and "improve
darcs annotate performance" (issue984).

It's not trivial because we have to track file and directory renames.  For
example, if I have a file 'f' that I create in one patch; and if I have a
directory 'd' that I create in another patch, then if 'f' gets moved into 'd'
the 'd' filecache has be absorbed into the 'f' one.  I imagine that there can be
some fairly tricky scenarios beyond this.

Taylor Campbell points out that a conservative strategy can simplify matters.

Just updating with the new name for filecache (patch index)

Bumped to 2.6 (but close to the 2.5 release):
http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2010-June/024355.html

For posterity, I found the following three informative references to this 
feature:

  * patch: http://bugs.darcs.net/patch173
  * GSoC proposal: http://www.google-
melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2011/bsrkaditya/1
  * wiki: http://wiki.darcs.net/Ideas/PatchIndex

I have made a simplified version of changes using patch index.
Basically it gives the output of darcs changes FILE.
Call it using darcs show patch-index-fileid ./FILE.
Make sure that FILE is the path to file wrt repo.
Do not forget to create a patch index first. :-)

Attachments

• changes.dpatch

Can this be considered resolved now? If not, what's the next step to move 
this forward?

Patch index is in darcs since a few months. I'm going to close this
issue and related ones.