On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 01:27:28PM -0700, Mike Sullivan wrote: > My plan is to transition as-is which yes, means keep the source tarballs > in the gate. I actually like that as I don't like having the build > possibly fail in the middle because it can't download something.
Which seems like the lowest risk approach. But another way would be to abolish the tarballs entirely. All source would be unpacked in the gate (so we get usable history - this has bitten us with Apache several times already) and tarballs become a generated build product for ... well, I don't know who wants that really since all licensing obligations can be satisfied by providing a snapshot of the gate, but it's easy to do. If you wanted to get really clever you could even have rules use the history to create both the original buggier source and the diffs applied to it over time. If someone in management is pressuring you to get this done, one assumes it's because they labour under the impression that this software is important. If that's true, being able to track source-level changes over time is also important and the tarball/patches strategy (no matter where the files are located) makes that impossible. The transition ought to be a great opportunity to fix this. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" Fishworks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!"
