Hi everyone, First, for those who have missed it, since darcs 2.8 all code testing features of darcs belong to the command "darcs test". Without flags, "darcs test" runs a test on the latest recorded state of the repository. However, flags --trackdown and --bisect look for the most recent recorded version passing a given test.
We already know how --trackdown and --bisect work: --trackdown runs a test agains the last recorded version, then the last version minus one patch, then minus two patches... until finding a passing test. --bisect sort of does the same by jumping back and forth in the history by dichotomy. See http://wiki.darcs.net/Using/Trackdown for more information and unusually friendly drawings :-) So, the new interesting feature in HEAD is the exponential backoff strategy, implemented by Michael Hendricks. As explained by Michael himself on the bug tracker: ----8<---- This patch series defines a new "darcs test" search strategy named --backoff. It's aimed at finding regressions which are closer to the head than to the middle of the repository. Under these conditions, in the screened repository, it performs between 30 and 70% faster than bisect. It will perform relatively better on repositories with more patches. The search strategy starts by unapplying 4 patches (chosen to match the break-even point with linear search). If the test fails, it unapplies 8 more patches and tests again. On each test failure, it removes twice the number of patches as before. Once the test passes, it bisects the patches it just skipped. ---->8---- I think it's quite cool, and I'm not aware of any other VCS that have this kind of test strategy. Guillaume _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
