Hello Björn,
I've analyzed this and discovered some very important points to make sure
everyone understands, so I hope my information below is very clear. Please
don't hesitate to ask any questions for clarification. The items fall into 2
categories.
First item:
The first item for discussion is a known weakness of the tool shed upload
process (or, to be more correct, the process of adding a new changeset revision
to a repository). When you commit a changeset to a repository that has
previous revisions, the tool shed repository metadata process is executed and
the contents of the new changeset are analyzed to determine if a new metadata
record should be created for the changeset or if the previous metadata record
should be moved up in the repository changelog chain (this is a very complex
analysis).
Until about 1 year ago, I reset all metadata on the entire repository
chjangelog when a new changeset was committed. This process worked very well,
and metadata was cleanly set for the entire changelog. However, this process
began to take significant periods of time as soon as repositories became larger
and the changelogs became longer (a good example is
http://testtoolshed.g2.bx.psu.edu/view/mzytnicki/s_mart).
To improve performance when adding new changesets to repositories, the metadata
analysis process was enhanced to inspect only those changesets that go back to
the previous revision with associated metadata. This process works very well
in most cases. However, there are unusual cases where the process breaks, and
your confab repository fell into this category. The issue arises when the
contents of a specific change set do not properly move the previous metadata
revision forward in the changelog, but instead create a new, additional
metadata revision.
When I initially inspected your confab repository had metadata associated with
the following revisions:
9:dd3ee8e742dc
8:113e876c2ec6
7:9e38b8bd4cdb
6:7593411dcd5a
5:aac0c82ac354
4:6c8f72ee4a51
3:09acaeb233d1
2:e7bb18ef7f54
1:49274c60f392
0:ea7816847e5e
I inspected the main contents (tools and dependencies) of these revisions and
noticed that some did not seem to have any differences (contents of the
containers had the same labels between revisions - I did not inspect the
changelog itself though). Because of this I decided to reset all metadata on
the repository (available in the Repository Actions menu), and now metadata is
associated with only the following revisions:
9:dd3ee8e742dc
6:7593411dcd5a
5:aac0c82ac354
3:09acaeb233d1
2:e7bb18ef7f54
1:49274c60f392
0:ea7816847e5e
This is a very complex issue to handle, as there are many things to consider.
Obviously automatically inspecting the entire changelog when a new changeset is
added will not work. I have added the ability for a repository owner to reset
all metadata on the repository, but there is nothing to alert them to initiate
this process (and I'm not sure how / when to do so). Also, resetting all
metadata on a repository eliminates the tool test results associated with each
of the original metadata revisions.
Second item:
==
It seems there is some confusion about the changeset revision that is defined
in dependency definitions. This is a fairly complex subject, and it seems I
may have muddied the waters a bit yesterday. If so, I apologize, but I think
Peter's last response to my example clarifies the issue.
Looking at the changelog of your confab repository, I see the following. You
have unnecessarily changed the changeset_revision setting in your tool
dependency definitions, and this has resulted in a new additional metadata
record being associated with changeset 9:dd3ee8e742dc of your confab
repository. This changeset revision setting should not have been changed - see
my discussion below.
Repository 'confab'
===
Changeset 9e38b8bd4cdb
modified:
tool_dependencies.xml
tool_dependencies.xml
--- a/tool_dependencies.xmlTue May 14 04:12:06 2013 -0400
+++ b/tool_dependencies.xmlTue May 14 04:17:08 2013 -0400
@@ -1,13 +1,13 @@
-http://testtoolshed.g2.bx.psu.edu/";
name="package_eigen_2_0" owner="bgruening" changeset_revision="294a30630e0b"
prior_installation_required="True" />
+http://testtoolshed.g2.bx.psu.edu/";
name="package_eigen_2_0" owner="bgruening" changeset_revision="09eb05087cd0"
prior_installation_required="True" />
-http://testtoolshed.g2.bx.psu.edu/";
name="package_eigen_2_0" owner="bgruening" changeset_revision="294a30630e0b">
+http://testtoolshed.g2.bx.psu.edu/";
name="package_eigen_2_0" owner="bgruening" changeset_revision="09eb05087cd0">
Looking at the changelog of your package_eigen_2_0 repository, I see the
following:
Repository 'package_eigen_2_0'
==
Cha
