Hi, Troy Benjegerdes: > How hard would it be to add hooks/helpers to dpkg-buildpackage to know how > to deal with git and mercurial repositories, and deterministically generate > the 'source' tar.gz from the repo? > Exactly: Get source by adding a vcs-git-commit: field which points to the sources in question, instead of uploading a huge .tar.?z file.
> If you take this approach a little farther, I think there's an argument (I > am not sure it's a good one yet) that the debian source archive will take > up quite a bit less space if it's using git/mercurial repositories that can > store a single copy of the same file that's used in 15 different releases, > while the current approach makes 15 copies in the source packages. We usually do not *have* 15 releases. What we do have is updated source, so the archive's mirrors would need to get five small files (the incremental git .pack, its local and global indices, the new refs/heads/BRANCH entry, and a tag created by the autobuilder) instead of one large and mostly-redundant tar.xz. A packed git repo is typically 10…20% larger than the .tar.gz it's built from, so even with better compression via .xz this would be a win whenever there's more than one source version in the archive. I do plan to investigate this idea further. Sometime after the release. -- -- Matthias Urlichs
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