check performance and API's

[Robert Collins]

I'd like to get input on a design question here.

One goal is to be able to check only part of a repository. This is
useful in a few circumstances, like after doing a pull, or when many
unrelated branches are stored in the repo.

Another goal is to avoid doing duplicate work during check. On small
repositories its tolerable, but on large ones it makes a long task
exhausting.

We currently call texts.check(), which extracts every text. We also
extract every text once via the inventory checks.

Similarly we extract every inventory.

I'm thinking that changing the vf check api to take an optional set of
keys to check, and a checker object to provide check results to.

If not provided, all keys would be checked. Check would then return the
same type of result as get_record_stream. The difference would be that
check would [optionally depending on the vf type] do extra consistency
checks.

This seems to me to permit checking of physical storage we don't look at
on every read operation, extracting every text so we can check the
chained sha1s downwards and avoiding duplicate work.

-Rob
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/attachments/20090603/cc101d2c/attachment.pgp