[gentoo-dev] Proposal: patches.gentoo.org

[Chris Gianelloni]

We were talking about this on IRC due to the growing concern over
patches and other files in ${FILESDIR} in the portage tree.  This is
basically the idea that we came up with to resolve the problem.

The proposal is to get infrastructure to provide a temporary location
for developers to upload patches which are necessary to be immediately
available to users.  This space would be writable by all CVS developers
and would be accessible to the world via http.  Developers would use
this space for temporary storage only for patches which are
created/rolled in-house.

For the sake of simplicity, I am going to call this server (though it
could be any number of servers) patches.gentoo.org for the remainder of
this document.

Ramereth suggesting using the existing rsync.gentoo.org infrastructure
servers for this task.  This would simplify replication, since the
replication could be done via rsync and use the same schedule as the
master portage tree replication.  This would ensure that the patches are
available at the same time as the ebuild.

The developer would use this temporary location as follows:

1. developer creates an ebuild which needs a patch
2. developer puts SRC_URI="patches.gentoo.org/${P}-$patchname" in the
ebuild, at the end of the SRC_URI definition
3. developer uploads patch to dev.gentoo.org:/space/patches-local and
dev.gentoo.org:/space/distfiles-local
4. developer commits ebuild(s) to cvs

The patch would replicate to the rsync boxes and would be available via
http immediately.

Remember that portage tries the Gentoo mirrors in ${GENTOO_MIRRORS}
before checking SRC_URI, so once the files hit the community mirrors,
the temporary location in SRC_URI would no longer be used.

A cron job would be added to the machine to clean out files older than 7
days.  This gives the mirrors plenty of time to locally mirror the
patches.  This also reduces the amount of space required on the machine
(s) hosting the files.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Operations/QA Manager
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux