[NIT] Managing repositories in MC

Avi Bryant avi at beta4.com
Sun Sep 21 19:49:01 UTC 2003


On Sun, 21 Sep 2003, Colin Putney wrote:

> I prefer a single list of repositories, with a per-package selection.
> So when you select a package, the selected repository switches to
> whatever was selected last time that package was selected. That's
> TSTTCPW, AFAICT.

It's certainly simple, and is how things used to work.  However, if you
have enough repositories this becomes unwieldy.  For example, whenever you
save a version, MC searches through all of the repositories for that
package to make sure the name/number it is assigning is (to the best of
its knowledge) unique.  If you have ten repositories, most of which are
irrelevant (ie, never have any versions for that package in them), this
search takes much longer than it needs to.  Ditto when searching for
ancestors during a merge.

This isn't premature optimization - it can take a couple of seconds to
connect to an FTP repository and get a directory listing.  Multiply this
by 10 and you have a serious annoyance.

It would also be very useful to enable/disable repositories even if you
had relatively few of them, because if, for example, you're not network
connected, you can smooth things by explicitly disabling remote
repositories (you don't want to just remove them or you'll have to
recreate them when you're next plugged in).



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