[svk-devel] "svk info" latency vs. vc-svk.el: pain vs. gain

[Chip Salzenberg]

I'm using svk (thanks clkao!) and vc-svk.el (thanks Sam!) and I mostly enjoy
the combination.  Except: vc-svk.el uses 'svk info' to determine whether a
file is source-controlled, and that's a four-second latency for every file.

When I 'emacs *.c', I have to wait a long time.

It's getting annoying.  So until I get Parrot working, I guess I'm stuck
with it being slow.  Ironically enough, this slowdown is a slight drag on
Parrot development.  :-(

I've strace'd 'svk info' and it spends most of those four seconds just
looking for and parsing Perl modules, so there's no easy fix.  Perhaps
SVK could make more extensive use of deferred loading, e.g. C<use autouse>?

An Emacs-specific wrapper around 'svk info' that caches answers could help.
It's a terrible hack, though.

Or, perhaps, a minimal 'tinysvk info' program could avoid all the extensive
module loads but knows enough to just say whether a file is controlled or
not.  For example, it could load only YAML, look in ~/.svk/config for the
current svn repo, and then (speculation begins) use 'svn' directly in some
way to find out whether the given file is currently controlled.

Thoughts?  Solutions?
-- 
Chip Salzenberg <chip at pobox.com>