Hi again,

Three more thoughts and I’ll shut up. (Is there a web page and
mailing list for this VCS-based archive project?)

James Westby wrote:

> We want to confirm that each source package is in the VCS. We don't want
> the VCS getting out of date as someone forgot to commit, that's just a
> pain.

Longer term, IIUC you could eliminate the source packages, but I
understand that it takes time to migrate.

> On Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:40:51 -0600, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:

>> What you are describing does not have as much to do with the Vcs-foo
>> repository as I was imagining. What you need is a hash of the source
>> tree used to build the package; the history is not at all relevant,
>> and in fact you would want to ignore it. The main thing this has to
>> do with version control systems is that each one has its own format
>> for the hash of a file system tree, I guess.
>
> Yes, I guess you are right. It could be an independent hash, but
> allowing it to be VCS specific will usually be much more efficient when
> checking.
>
> I don't mind too much either way, the reason I suggested Vcs-*-tree was
> that I came from Vcs-*-revision and realised tree information would be
> useful too.

The main not-so-nice thing about only providing the tree would be that
whoever checks this would have to iterate over revisions looking for
that tree hash. To avoid this, it might even be worth just using the
revision (sorry for the wobble --- it just took me a while to understand
what you’re doing). Whatever tool you use to build the source package
and insert this field (bzr-buildpackage --ubuntu, I guess) could
disallow building from a dirty tree.

Using just a tree hash would allow lower-level tools to compute the
hash. That is, as long as it is clear what format to use, dpkg-source
could compute the hash, or the archive software could compute the hash
itself and add it to Sources.

Jonathan


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On Fri, 19 Feb 2010 20:35:31 -0600, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi again,
>
> Three more thoughts and I’ll shut up. (Is there a web page and
> mailing list for this VCS-based archive project?)

Hi,

Thanks for the interest, your comments are valuable.

There is some information at

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DistributedDevelopment/

which points to this mailing list:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-distributed-devel

There is also some overlap with

http://vcs-pkg.org/

> Longer term, IIUC you could eliminate the source packages, but I
> understand that it takes time to migrate.

Yes, that's a goal. We want to get to the point where people don't dput
source packages to upload (we already have source-only uploads in
Ubuntu), they request a build from a bzr branch instead. Source packages
will probably stick around for a while for various reasons: GPL
compliance, similarity to Debian, mirroring, etc.

> The main not-so-nice thing about only providing the tree would be that
> whoever checks this would have to iterate over revisions looking for
> that tree hash. To avoid this, it might even be worth just using the
> revision (sorry for the wobble --- it just took me a while to understand
> what you’re doing). Whatever tool you use to build the source package
> and insert this field (bzr-buildpackage --ubuntu, I guess) could
> disallow building from a dirty tree.

I agree that you may have to iterate, but there will typically only be a
couple of candidate revisions the way our system works, and having both
the revision and the tree narrows the search further.

I'm not keen on requiring a build from a clean tree, as that isn't how
some developers would want to work, and so I feel that if a system that
allows that isn't to difficult to achieve we should put the burden on
the automated side.

> Using just a tree hash would allow lower-level tools to compute the
> hash. That is, as long as it is clear what format to use, dpkg-source
> could compute the hash, or the archive software could compute the hash
> itself and add it to Sources.

Yes, that would also be a possibility.

Thanks,

James


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