Speed up a darcs repo by making it boring

April 21st, 2008

Darcs employs the concept of a boring-file which it uses to ignore certain files and directories which would normally not be recorded in a patch (CVS directories for instance). If there are things one has filling up in their repo (test photos for user accounts etc.), they can also add these to their boring-file to be ignored.

Say, for instance, you have somedir which contains sub-directories of photos and thumbs which you want to ignore (say because of testing or something). You can simply edit

_darcs/prefs/boring

from the root of your repo and add

(^|/)somedir/(thumbs|photos)($|/)

to it.

This causes darcs to ignore these directories and any others below. This should also speed up darcs scanning through all these files are slowing things down.