On 18:10 Mon 26 Jan     , Mike Auty wrote:
> Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> > I'm still not convinced of that. The alternative would require a patch 
> > to git-submodules, some additional tools support for grabbing additional 
> > repos with checkouts and repoman, but it has some compelling advantages 
> > (like non-devs don't need 1 GB of web space / bandwidth to post their 
> > forks of the tree).
> 
> Aren't the existing overlays a suitable method of tree forking?

If you don't care about history. I do. Picture this use case:

Mike is a user without push access to the main tree. He forks off a copy 
of package Foo-1.0. The Gentoo maintainer quit. Mike bumps this package 
5 times, makes major changes to the ebuild, and eventually becomes a dev 
so he can get his changes in.

Wouldn't it be great if Mike could simple merge his package into the 
tree without losing all that history? This would make git-bisect 
meaningful, instead of bringing in a huge collection of unrelated 
changes in a single commit, making bisection useless for finding bugs.

> I agree, 1Gb's a bit steep, but someone commented[1] that they'd
> compressed their (relatively current) checkout down to 650ish Mb.

Thanks for the pointer to that thread, I hadn't seen it!

> Rereading past threads it looks like we still need someone to try
> setting up and running repoman against git's cvsserver implementation.

I don't really think this matters. At some point we'll want to cut off 
CVS access. Whether we have git in place on only a test repo or on the 
gold repo before this cutoff doesn't seem like it would be that 
relevant.

> I'll see how small I can make my repo, and if it's significantly smaller
> (under 700Mb), I can post it to dev.g.o for those that want to duplicate
> it (although, as ever, please be nice to infra and yoink it using http
> not ssh).  Also remember that doing cvsimported git repos should be
> cloned from rather than modified directly (I think it breaks the ability
> to do further incremental updates)...

Just curious why you want to post it as a separate repo? If you come up 
with a magic repacking command, just push your new commits and ask Robin 
to run a repack.

I expect Robin would want to set you up on git.overlays.g.o if you 
really want to post it. He got a little annoyed with me when I put mine 
on dev.g.o.

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Developer, Gentoo Linux
Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com