Re: [gentoo-project] Portage repo usage survey and change evaluation

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Wed, 2 Mar 2016, Robin H Johnson wrote:

> I just hadn't finished putting the results into a long-term format
> quite yet, but did so this afternoon:
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~robbat2/201602-portage-survey/

Thank you.

> Some remarks about question #2 and #3:

> Q2: Reduce local disk usage by excluding ChangeLogs?
> ----------------------------------------------------
> It was unfortunately pointed out to me very late that my question #2
> had some confusing text:
> - "No, but only if were optional (I do NOT want it, but others might)"
> - "Yes, but only if it were optional (I want it, but others might NOT)"

> The bracket portion of each answer was interpreted as meaning the
> opposite as the start of each answer :-(.

> Either way, ~60% are in favour of getting rid of changelogs.

Not sure if it can be interpreted this way. This would contradict the
results of both Q1 and Q3.

For Q1, 45 responses read ChangeLogs in some way (A1.2 to A1.5 or a
combination of them), whereas only 17 responses don't read ChangeLogs
at all (A1.1 or some combination including it). Disregarding the two
responses who at the same time read them and don't read them at all.

> IMO this is a BETTER goal than continuing to generate them for
> rsync, and bike-shedding about what the order should be; and it
> provides a huge benefit by reducing the size of rsync by 155MiB.

Hm, that's almost 40% of the total size of the tree.

   $ find /usr/portage/ -type f -name 'ChangeLog-20*' -printf '%s\n' | awk '{ s+=$1 } END { print s/1024^2 }'
   102.961

That's the old ones from CVS.

   $ find /usr/portage/ -type f -name ChangeLog -printf '%s\n' | awk '{ s+=$1 } END { print s/1024^2 }'
   52.0908

That's the new ones autogenerated from git.

How is it possible that we have 52 MiB of ChangeLog entries generated
in the 0.5 years since the git conversion, whereas we had only a total
of 103 MiB in the 13.5 years since ChangeLogs were introduced in 2002?
Certainly our commit rate hasn't increased by more than an order of
magnitude in the last half year?

> Q3: What order should ChangeLog entries be in?
> ----------------------------------------------
> - 85.3% of responses either preferred newest first OR didn't care
>   (incl so as long as the tools work).
> - 2.9% wanted oldest first.
> - NOBODY selected "I'd prefer oldest entries first, but do what is
>   best for distribution"
> - 11.8% said get rid of changelogs.

Ulrich