OpenZFS branch tracking policy

[Warner Losh]

On Fri, Apr 2, 2021 at 11:56 AM Ed Maste <emaste at freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 2 Apr 2021 at 11:50, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> >
> > We'd always hoped that we'd be able to do subtree merges from upstreams
> > that use git into FreeBSD. The big worry, though, was that this would
> > needless bloat the repo with a lot of history. We don't want, for
> example,
> > all of LLVM's history in the tree. We'd always anticipated that there'd
> be
> > some things we'd just accept the history for, since it is similar in
> > character to the vendor branches (though of course a bit more).
>
> Note that if we do want to avoid bringing in the full history `git
> subtree merge` supports a `--squash` option. This brings in the set of
> upstream changes as a single commit, without bringing along the
> associated history. We will need to do more experimentation to confirm
> that the full process, including bootstrapping, will work as we want.
> Assuming this all works it should allow us to forgo the use of a
> FreeBSD-specific vendor branch in src.
>
> We've discussed mirroring any such 3rd-party source in some
> FreeBSD-controlled repository. This would allow the project to retain
> a full copy of the history, but avoid bloating src with it.
>
> I agree with Warner that we may want a different policy (full history
> or snapshots) for different contrib sources.
>

Good points Ed. I'd forgotten about --squash.

Martin, what's your timeline for wanting to implement these things? I'm
unfamiliar with the OpenZFS schedules.

Warner