Public SourceMage Discussion List

[flux <flux AT sourcemage.org>]

Seth Alan Woolley (seth AT swoolley.homeip.net) wrote [09.06.12 01:52]:
> Why not discontinue adding to HISTORY and put all history in the git commit 
> message.  The reason why is that gaze HISTORY can simply get it from git.  
> If the package has the git commit it came from somewhere it can be sure it 
> has the correct git log too.
> 
> Why bloat our downloads for every change?
> 
> Every git clone will get the history, and we can move the history files to 
> a 
> part that doesn't get downloaded each time and make gaze HISTORY grab the 
> rest of the changes from the moved location of the HISTORY files in git.
> 
> The GPL does require we include changes with source downloads (as per git), 
> but the actual download most users will get need not include all that extra 
> data which will never be used -- it's the "binary".
> 
> Somebody might delete the HISTORY files to see how much space we could save 
> to see if it's worth it.
> 
> Seth

This would require everyone to have a copy of the git repository, which
is not how we currently do things. Using the git repository directly
might be an interesting idea though (many developers do this), since it
would probably drastically reduce update times (the initial clone might
be "expensive", but seeing as that can happen during the ISO build, the
end user may never really experience that initial hit unless they wipe
out their clone and need to re-clone).

However, I think this would be a separate topic for discussion (if
people are interested to discuss it) and would warrant it's own thread,
so if people want to continue debating this one please open a new thread
for it. :)

The original discussion was whether HISTORY would be generated from git
commits, which could either happen at commit time via push hooks (or
commit hooks in local repos before pushing upstream), or it could happen
during release generation (so that the HISTORY files aren't necessarily
part of the actual repo, they're just generated to appear in the release
tarballs). Under both of these possibilities, the end users would still
have all the HISTORY files, so there would not be any changes required
to gaze HISTORY or anything similar.

-- 
Justin "flux_control" Boffemmyer
Cauldron wizard and general mage
Source Mage GNU/Linux
http://www.sourcemage.org

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