Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Removing support for mercurial repos in repositories.xml

[Michał Górny]

On Sun, 2018-09-23 at 18:46 -0400, Alec Warner wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 23, 2018 at 4:42 PM Michał Górny <mgorny@g.o> wrote:
>
> > Hi, everyone.
> >
> > I'd like to ask Gentoo repository owners to switch off Mercurial
> > and remove all Mercurial repositories from repositories.xml.  There are
> > two reasons for that:
> >
> > 1. Portage does not support syncing from Mercurial repos, and needs to
> > use external tools (e.g. layman) for that.
> >
> > 2. Mercurial is buggy and maintaining support for those repos is PITA.
> >
> > If you noticed that Gentoo repository mirrors did not update for 10
> > hours a few days ago -- Mercurial was the reason.  It is very fragile,
> > and if some server chokes during sync, it hangs the whole process until
> > somebody (which means me) kills it.  And it's not the first time it
> > killed the whole system.
> >
> > Yes, I could add process timeouts.  But small timeouts are going to
> > break the occasional necessity of cloning big repos, and big timeouts
> > are going to make little difference when Mercurial starts hanging again.
> >
>
> So you are against timeouts altogether, or you just don't want to implement
> them?

I'm against dumb timeouts.  Good timeout = die if nothing happens for T.
 Bad timeout = die if process doesn't finish for T (yet it may still be 
doing something).

>
>
> >
> > If someone really cares about this horrible piece of software, I'd
> > appreciate patches (preferably going upstream) to make it timeout sanely
> > when something hangs.  Otherwise, I'd like to announce discontinuation
> > of Mercurial support soon.
> >
> > --
> > Best regards,
> > Michał Górny
> >

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny