RF vs GITHUB and ports trouble

Stanislav Sedov stas at FreeBSD.org
Tue Jan 12 08:13:56 UTC 2010


On Tue, 12 Jan 2010 07:58:07 +0000
"Philip M. Gollucci" <pgollucci at p6m7g8.com> mentioned:

> Stanislav Sedov wrote:
> > You can hardly do something with this.  If the
> > upstream projects doesn't make releases, you
> > as a maintainer need to figure out what are
> > the right branch points are (when the project
> > is most stable), make snapshot of the tree
> > and upload it somewhere, where the port can
> > find it.
> So lets say I'm a project on git hub and I do --
> $ git tag v2.3.6
> 
> but I never generate an actual .gem or .tgz or whatever package.
> You think I should make 36 of them myself, and host them on a mirrored 
> network somewhere? I highly doubt most non committers are up to that task.
> 
> Rather, we should figure out how to 'checkout/download' that tag/branch
> and assemble it into [a in this case .gem] package so the existing ports 
> framework can use it.
> 

This was discussed several times already[1].
While certainly valuable, it is impossible
to do due to several reasons.  The main ones:
1) Inability to check checksums of files
   downloaded.  Are you going to calculate
   the hash from the each file in the repo?
2) Inability to save distfiles. This also means
   that there will be no mirrors.
3) These ports will be much more vulnerable
   to failures due to breakages/changes in
   the repo, etc. This problem will be also
   amplified by the lack of FreeBSD mirrors
   due to 2).

I don't think it poses a problem for the
maintainer to create the snapshot from a github
repo, as it can be done automatically by a simple
script.  If he has no space to host the file,
he can also ask to put it onto FreeBSD servers
in PR he submits.  We had this practice for a
long time.  As the additional benefit this
will also guarantee, that the maintainer 
performed at least minimum visual check of
changes, and this was not a blind version
bump as always happens.

[1]: check the "[PROPOSAL] Ports using SCM repositories as source instead of distfiles"
thread on ports@ for example.

-- 
Stanislav Sedov
ST4096-RIPE


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