Proposal for new frozen repositories server

[Daniel Drake]

On 6 February 2011 15:55, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at laptop.org> wrote:
> 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.

I agree. None of that changes under my proposal. No packages are
removed from the system.

> 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.]

git has a tendency to hang during switches between branches, meaning
you have to kill it then clean up the mess. I tried to do prune and
gc, left it for hours and nothing seemed to happen. The repo is big
and ugly, and trying to google the issues I just see people saying
that git shouldn't be used for binary trees and talking about its
inefficiencies.

I agree with the design principles of the existing mock and don't feel
like they are being changed under my proposal -- just the storage
system.

Thanks a lot for jumping in!
Daniel