svn - but smaller?

[Chris Rees]

On 23 January 2013 20:41, Isaac (.ike) Levy <ike at blackskyresearch.net> wrote:
> On Jan 23, 2013, at 2:17 PM, Emanuel Haupt wrote:
>> Oliver Brandmueller <ob at e-Gitt.NET> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> in ancient times there was cvsup. cvsup was a PITA if you wanted (or
>>> needed) to install it via ports, the only reasonable way was to use
>>> pkg_add for that if you didn't want to pollute your system with
>>> otherwise unneeded software.
>>>
>>> Then there came csup. Small, in the base. You could install FreeBSD
>>> and the first task (for me and my environment) was often to simply
>>> csup to -STABLE (or a known good version of that) and to build an
>>> up-to-date and customised system. Like tayloring make.conf and
>>> src.conf to my needs and leave out most of the stuff I don't need on
>>> my system and in the kernel. Software and drivers that aren't there
>>> can't fail and won't be a security problem.
>>>
>>> Times have been changing, we're now up to svn. svn is far more modern
>>> than cvs and there are pretty good reasons to use it.
>>>
>>> However, I either overlook something important or we are now at the
>>> point we had with cvsup in the early days: The software I need to
>>> (source-)update the system doens't come with the base and installing
>>> svn is a PITA. It pulls in a whole lot of dependencies, at the time
>>> being in FBSD-9.1-R I cannot even pkg_add -r subversion out of the
>>> box. And in the end I have my system polluted with software and
>>> libraries I don't really need in many cases for anything else.
>>>
>>> So, is there some alternative small svn client, that leaves a
>>> drastically smaller footprint probably somewhere around, probably
>>> even in the ports or is there anything I'm missing? The current
>>> situaion for me is a bit annoying. From the user's or admin's point
>>> of view at least. I didn't even see an option in svn to not build the
>>> server components, which would probably already help to make things
>>> smaller?
>>>
>>> Thanx,
>>>      Oliver
>
> On Jan 23, 2013, at 2:09 PM, Peter Wemm wrote:
>> On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 9:05 AM, Isaac (.ike) Levy
>> <ike at blackskyresearch.net> wrote:
>>
>>> 1) License.  Many of SVN's dependencies will never be available in the FreeBSD source.
>>> While this is totally OK for development, SVN is 3rd party software, this is unacceptable to force as 'the' respected path for OS source builds.
>>
>> Don't confuse the excessive ports default settings as dependencies.
>> You can make a quite mean and lean svn client.  I did a 100%
>> BSD-license-compatible src/contrib/svn style proof-of-concept back
>> when we were planning what to do.  Things like gdbm and bdb are not
>> required and are license contamination that we don't need.  But that's
>> the fault of the port, not a fundamental property of using svn.
>
>
> On Jan 23, 2013, at 2:17 PM, Emanuel Haupt wrote:
>> devel/subversion already has an option to build a static version. A
>> solution could be to create a stub port (devel/subversion-static)
>> similar to:
>>
>> shells/bash-devel
>> shells/bash-static-devel
>>
>> dns/ldns
>> dns/py-ldns
>>
>> That way the package build cluster would create a package of the static
>> version which wouldn't pull in any runtime dependencies.
>>
>> Emanuel
>
> Peter, this work sounds great, and sounds like it would make a great stub port itself!
> I'd love to see whatever you have remaining from the proof-of-concept work, to perhaps help expand it into 'devel/subversion-lite' or 'devel/subversion-static' ?  I'd happily use it for development.
>
> --
> However, SVN for development use is not what the point, this thread is about using, administrating, and maintaining FreeBSD systems- not about development process.  And in that case, SVN is still a fairly massive toolset for the simple task of fetching REL, STABLE, or CURRENT:
>
>   Source for SVN-alone:    55M
>   Source for FreeBSD 9.1:  746M
>
> That's still over 7% of the size of the entire OS.
>
> I believe it's not at all necessary to have anything except the base FreeBSD OS, to update/install FreeBSD.
>
> --
> A NYC*BUG list user posted this reminder, we've been here before:
>
>> Deja-vu…  This reminds me of cvsup+modula-3.
>>
>> http://www.mavetju.org/mail/view_message.php?list=freebsd-current&id=209027
>
>
> I'll keep hacking on our shell utility, and will post the PR to this thread.

Your shell utility appears to fetch a new tarball of the entire repo
each time?  That's very bandwidth-unfriendly for the Project's servers
as well as yours...

Chris