[Mageia-sysadm] Packages SVN

[nicolas vigier]

On Thu, 04 Nov 2010, Luca Berra wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 03, 2010 at 11:12:53PM +0100, Olivier Blin wrote:
>> nicolas vigier <boklm at mars-attacks.org> writes:
>>
>>> We can also remove history on cauldron binary branch, although it will
>>> require to stop new commits for a few minutes/hours, doing something like
>>> this :
>>> http://robmayhew.com/delete-parts-of-subversion-history/
>>
>> Right, we could do in such a way.
>> Each N distro branch could contain binary history from N-1 to N.
>>
>> For example when we release 2011.1, we would have binary history in the
>> 2011.1 distro branch from 2011.0 to 2011.1, and start cauldron from a
>> one-revision copy.

I'm not sure we need to keep history from N-1 to N (which is previous
cooker versions), maybe we can erase it. And only have history from
N (release date) to N + updates.

>> Though, there is a disadvantage that could get problematic, when we do
>> backports, we would have to copy the binaries to all target distros, and
>> it would not be a cheap SVN copy anymore.
>> This could get pretty big with games and OOo...

Yes.

> I wonder why use svn at all in order to store blobs
> IMHO it does not give any advantage

The advantage is that it is easier to implement, and already implemented
now in a repsys branch on git. But it is still possible to replace the
SVN binary repositories with something else later.

> source tarballs in packages are usually compressed, so no delta is
> possible, besides that sources are usually removed and the new one is
> added, so it wont be even tried.
> removing something from SVN is a PITA

Removing something from SVN is not very difficult, if removing all
history before a commit (and not only some of the files).

> creating a branch for each distro will waste enormous amounts of space,
> and will create the issue pointed above by blino.
>
> why not just use flat files to store flat files?
> iirc redhat is doing this to store files
>
> if i were to design this i would index flat files by sha
> and modify repsys/mdvsys in order to commit a file containing the sha in
> svn://specrepo/package/SOURCES/foo-0.0.1.tar.xz instead of the real blob
> and checkout the real file from file://binrepo/hashed_dir/sha instead of
> the dummy.

It can be a good idea, but it requires some work to implement it. I
think it's something that can be done later.