[Monotone-devel] nuskool status update

[Derek Scherger]

I noticed someone wondering about the status of the nuskool branch today 
so here's a quick update.

In a nutshell it "sorta" works as far as requesting and transferring 
revisions is concerned. It does not attempt to synchronize keys or certs 
which is obviously a bit of a problem and I'm not sure how we should 
deal with certs.

There is a problem with interrupting a sync and then restarting it at 
the moment. Any part of the revision graph that starts from the null 
revision [] will be excluded unless some part of it was previously 
included. The fix might be as simple as always including the null 
revision in the frontier set.

The code is very simple and should be easy to understand though, so 
picking it up probably involves an hour or two of reading it over to get 
started.

I have a few different uncommitted experimental changes kicking around:

1. interleaved http requests - I was hoping to help http sync go faster 
by interleaving requests issued from the client and processing responses 
from the server. The basic idea is to send a request for a full 
revision, then store the response to the previous request before waiting 
for a response to the current request so that both sides can be doing 
useful work rather then operating completely synchronously. This didn't 
seem to make much difference which surprised me a bit so I haven't 
committed it. If anyone is interested let me know and I'll dust it off 
and commit it.

2. direct http connections - This is a relatively simple change to allow 
a nuskool client to talk directly to a server without requiring an scgi 
speaking webserver in the middle. There seem to be some problems with 
repeatedly connecting/disconnecting to a server that I haven't tracked 
down yet. Only the first few requests succeed and then the server stops 
accepting connections. I wonder whether this could be a problem in netxx 
related to setting the socket backlog size or something.

3. binary roster delta format - This is not really related to the 
nuskool branch but something that has been talked about a bit. This 
replaces the basic_io representation of roster deltas and replaces it 
with a more raw binary format. Again this didn't turn out to be much of 
a speed win but the replacement code is a bit nicer than the basic_io 
equivalent.

Yes, I know, I should probably be committing these things. ;)

I'll try to be around on IRC when I can. Have fun at the summit.

Cheers,
Derek