Official git export

perryh at pluto.rain.com perryh at pluto.rain.com
Sat Sep 3 05:14:19 UTC 2011


Andriy Gapon <avg at freebsd.org> wrote:

> ... keeping local history is of course not necessary, but when
> you need to do some serious history analysis it comes extremely
> convenient.

In the area where one is working, certainly, but I don't expect to
need the commit history of the contrib tree while working on UFS or
gmirror.

> few hundred MB is nothing for a development environment.

A few hundred MB of disk space is nothing.  Having to _download_
a few hundred MB of source code, that one already has, is _not_
"nothing" unless one has a rather large pipe.  I'm not the first
to raise this point:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arch/2011-August/011595.html
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arch/2011-August/011605.html

One way to mitigate this would be to provide the ability to
download and install VCS metadata (back-deltas, commit comments,
etc.) for particular files and directories "as needed".  If that
level of granularity is problematic, just splitting the metadata
into 5 groups would help:

  group            contents                             size *

  infrastructure   all files directly in /usr/src; and   66 MB
                   subdirs etc, include, lib, libexec,
                   release, rescue, share, tools.

  contrib          /usr/src/contrib                     232 MB

  crypto           /usr/src/{crypto,kerberos5,secure}    40 MB

  kernel           /usr/src/sys                         143 MB

  other            /usr/src/{bin,cddl,games,gnu,         50 MB
                   sbin,usr.bin,usr.sbin}

* size of /usr/src/... reported by "du -s" in 8.1.  This is the
  size of the code, not including any VCS metadata, but it seems
  likely to give a reasonable idea of the relative metadata sizes
  (i.e. the size of a group's metadata will be -- very roughly --
  proportional to the size of its code).

For that matter, FreeBSD could provide the VCS metadata corresponding
to each release as a separate ISO, so those who need it can obtain
and install it.  Those for whom large downloads are a problem could
buy it on CD.

> ... doing some non-trivial FreeBSD development myself ...

Unless you're considerably older than you look in that Flickr
photo from about a year ago (in Kiev), I was doing non-trivial
OS development before you finished middle school :)


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