Re: Standardizing the layout of git packaging repositories

[Reinhard Tartler <siretart@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Aug 17, 2014 at 1:31 PM, Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
> Thomas Goirand <zigo@debian.org> writes:
>
>> As Charles wrote, pristine-tar works with small tarballs, but when
>> upstream has multi-megabytes tarballs and releases often, the Git
>> repository quickly grows to something not manageable.
>
> This does not match my experience at all.  I have packaged software like
> that with pristine-tar, and the pristine-tar branch is still quite small.
>
>> Yes, that's a problem. Though it's easy to download what's been
>> previously uploaded to Debian before the final upload. At least easier
>> than downloading 293874 old copies of past released tarball in the
>> pristine-tar branch.
>
> You realize that pristine-tar only stores references and a small delta,
> and does not store copies of the tarball, right?

If used carefully.

If the upstream branch does not precisely match the contents of the
tarball, you can end up with a big mess easily, and pristine-tar is
not really supportive with that.

Other than that, I am really curious to learn more about the
fundamental design problems with pristine-tar.
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=pristine-tar doesn't
look great, but not too bad either.


-- 
regards,
    Reinhard