is it possible to rebase a paratext project?

Question

When I try to do a Find and Replace (or RegEx Pal or View History on verse), Paratext seems to be doing something intensive, because over the life of our 20+ year project, that process takes longer and longer and I'm wondering if it's due to there being 20K+ revisions in the repo.

If it is true that the slowness is due to the many revisions, I'm wondering whether it's possible to rebase the project to get rid of some of them. We're about to publish our NT + selected OT books and it would be a good time to do it... Certainly any distinct change > 1 or 2 years ago is irrelevant to us.

Is it possible to rebase our projects (presumably on the Paratext server)? Or is that not the problem?

Answer 1

Neither Find/Replace nor RegexPal search the full history of a project, so I can't imagine having a long history would slow things down.

The general answer is that you can't edit or trim the history in a project. The more technically accurate answer is that you can't do it with your current project, but you can create a new project which has things trimmed down. You have to keep in mind that that requires the entire team to delete the old one and re-download a new one, and that you'll have to register the new on on the PT Registry. It's a question of whether it's worth the time and trouble.

The actual process of trimming history is also complex, involving command line tools and the actual versioning program PT uses (Mercurial). If all that sounds like a foreign language, you'd need technical help if you wanted to do this. If that sounds possible, I can search my notes for the actual commands I used a while back to delete history older than a certain point (I did this when we were moving from PT 7 to 8, and thus re-registering the project anyway).

Answer 2

As mnJames has said, Find should not be impacted by the history. However, there are a number of things that I have found cause Paratext to work slowly.

• Make sure that Windows is up-to-date and there is not an update downloading. This often impacts all programs.
• Restarting Paratext and/or Windows can sometimes help speed things up.
• Try closing all of the windows in Paratext except for the project you are working on to see if this speeds things.
• Working in Unformatted view can often cause the program to work more slowly.
• Working with View all Chapters turned on can cause the program to work more slowly.
• Working on non-canonical books (GLO, TDX, XXA-XXG, etc) is almost always slower than other books because of the lack of verse numbers.
• Sometimes running a Paratext reset (https://paratext.org/ufaqs/how-do-i-reset-paratext/) will help clear out issues.