[Haskell-cafe] haskellwiki slow/unresponsive

[John MacFarlane]

+++ Gwern Branwen [Jun 06 11 17:47 ]:
> On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 4:45 PM, Greg Weber <greg at gregweber.info> wrote:
> 
> > Gitit uses darcs or git to store data, but through the command line
> > interfaces. Unfortunately to my knowledge darcs does not expose a library
> > interface. Gitit could be made faster and more secure by interfacing with
> > libgit2.
> 
> Darcs does export a library and pretty much has ever since I first
> cabalized it; see http://hackage.haskell.org/package/darcs for the
> module listings. It's not a very useful API, however. I don't know how
> to use it, and John doesn't know how to use libgit2, I suspect.

I haven't had much time to work on gitit + filestore lately, and I'll
have even less in the future.  I'd rather focus my programming time on
pandoc.  So I'd be game if someone wanted to take the project in a new
direction.

Looks as if there are already Haskell bindings to libgit2:
http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/hlibgit2
A first step might be rewriting filestore to use libgit and libdarcs
instead of shelling out to the programs.

It also might be nice to create a filestore instance that uses a
persistent in-memory datastore like acid-state; this would be very fast,
and appropriate for a wiki (like hawiki) with mostly textual content.

I would also not object to a rewrite using Yesod -- the type-safe URLs
and the support for subsites would both be really useful in gitit.

John