Re: our repository grew to 0.5 gig - can we reduce that somehow?
On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 08:35:31AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> I do not recommend to remove the tags: they are useful information and on the
> server side, they are not duplicating data.
Well, this might be different from case to case. I'd call a sequence of
tags containing just a new changelog entry "New upstream version" more
or less redundant. In case you might care for historical data I would
consider snapshot.debian.org as more reliable, because only what showed
up there was really released. People might have forgotten to tag a
release or a tagged release might have been rejected for whatever reason.
For me our SVN as a whole is rather some kind of knowledge base how
people have solved similar problems I might have. Most of the tags do
not really add additional knowledge and thus are rather noise than
information if you are seeking some solution. So handling the tagging
just for the sake of completeness does not make much sense to me. It
would probably be better to keep only those tags where some basic
restructuring in the packaging might have happened. IMHO the Debian
packaging repository is not really a continuos development tree as in
software development but a discrete number of development states which
has frequently not to many changes from step to step. Not storing some
steps inbetween while beeing able to reconstruct them from a different
source (snapshots.debian.org) seems to be a reasonable compromise to
me (in case I do not have overlooked some important thing).
> The problem is how have lean checkouts without the tags.
That's correct in any case.
> Some packaging teams (pkg-perl, in particular) use an alternate structure for
> their repository, whith an early split for tags and trunks. In that case, it is
> possible to check out all the trunks for all the pakcages, but it is more
> difficult to check out the tags and the trunk together for one single package.
But IMHO this is not the problem here. Steffen would probably be happy
to have only trunk. And we actually *have* the trunk directory in the
root of our SVN and thus we could move to the layout as it is used in
other teams.
> I think that we discussed already about the possibility of migrating to this
> layout, and concluded that nobody has time for this.
Well, thinking again about this: I would not have time to do this
migration manually, there are two options:
1. Somebody writes some code which does the migration automatically.
2. We might consider a "soft migration" by just moving the tags for every
package you are touching anyway. I somehow have some preference
for this kind of moves because it isolates those packages which are
not touched for a long time and probably need some care.
> Back to the problem of checking out packages without tags, I think that we can
> use the ???mr??? tool to achieve this. I have made a bit of experimentation in the
> context of the Euclayptus packaging team. If you are interested, you can have
> a look at the following wiki page:
>
> http://wiki.debian.org/pkg-eucalyptus#Cross-repositorycheckout
>
> We could also have for Debian Med a single command that would check out all our
> packages, regardless of the repository. In parallel, the Blends metapackages
> could also include a mr configuration file to check out all the pakcages
> installed by the Blends metapackage.
Care to provide such a configuration file template? I have never dived
into mr and will not have time to do so in the near future but the idea
sound neat.
> There would be a couple of design
> decisions to take (for instance, would we require that environment variables
> DEBEMAIL and DEBFULLNAME are available ?), and this could be discussed
> on the Blends mailing list.
Yes. I would be happy if you would foreward this issue to the Blends list.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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