Proposal for new frozen repositories server

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 7:29 AM, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
> mock.laptop.org, our server for "frozen packages" i.e. a clone of the
> latest Fedora and OLPC RPMs frozen for each software release, is out
> of disk space and somewhat unloved, and I'd like to use the
> opportunity to make some changes to the system.
>
> In a sentence, the changes are: Repositories which are essentially
> unmodified by OLPC are moved out of revision control, and OLPC-local
> repositories are moved from being unrelated branches in a
> huge/old/long-living git repository into their own individual,
> short-lived git repositories.
>
> Full details here:
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:DanielDrake/NewMockProposal
>
> Comments welcome. I'm looking to refine the proposal and implement it
> within the next few weeks

Why not just add more disk space?  Disk space is cheap.  Or archive
the older parts of the repo.

The benefit to version controlling even the non-OLPC packages is that
the repo contains a *complete* snapshot of all the bits that went into
a particular build.  This protects against upstream reorganizing their
repos, or cleaning old packages, or changing their package manager,
etc, etc.  It makes builds 100% reproducible at any point in the
future (or at least that was the point).  Removing any packages from
the repo would pretty much defeat the whole purpose.

If disk space really is a problem, one alternative is to make release
candidate builds on a branch, and only merge released builds to
master.  Then you can prune the branches with git to free up disk
space, while still ensuring that you have all the bits related to
released builds.  But really -- why not more disk?  [I understand
there are parts of mock which are non-ideal, but the essential "saving
all the bits" part isn't one of them. IMHO.]
  --scott

-- 
                         ( http://cscott.net/ )