Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Treeve Jelbert <treeve AT scarlet.be>]

There are several spells on my system where I have to use a svn checkout, or 
snapshot tarball, because:

. no stable tarball
. need new features
. fix build problems 

In some cases the snapshot tarballs are large and change frequently, causing 
long download times.

I have recently discovered that all the spells which I use in this category 
already, or soon will, have git repositories avaliable.

This tempts me to try something which I have considered for a while.

Make these spells git-able.
. DOWNLOAD will clone/update a local git repo
. PRE_BUILD: will checkout the required branch (master, version x.y.z, ...) 
and create some symlinks.
. one spell can support multiple branches
. can no longer verify checksums, unless I calculate the hash of a branch 
after a clean checkout, ignoring everything in .git

The space occupied by the git repos would not be significantly larger than 
the 
existing download tarballs or svn checkouts, and after the initial clone, 
downloads would be much faster.
In my case, I would store these repos in a separate partition, mounted on 
/var/git, but this would be a user config option.

If the spell supports out-of-tree builds (cmake, ...), I could leave the 
build 
tree linked to the repo and avoid caching the install This would save space 
and also speed up subsequent builds.


I would no longer need to install subversion, apr and co. Maybe I could 
eliminate bzr and hg as well, if I can find suitable repositories for the 
spells which use them.

I would still have all the nice dependency  and build features of SMGL.

Is this of general interest, or shall I just try this in a local git branch?


-- 
Regards, Treeve

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