[arch-general] abs [WAS: arch-dev-public] Package maintainers wanted - heimdal, db, abs

[C Anthony Risinger]

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 3:56 PM, csgeek <csgeek at archlinux.us> wrote:
> Somewhat related question....
>
> I've seen a few places deploy git based build systems.
>
> funtoo (re-implementation of gentoo's portage but git based) and the arch
> based that was linked above.
>
> I'm just curious.. at some point wouldn't that just create excessive history
> that's not needed?  Do you really care about PKGBUILD of something that's
> 2..3.... 5 years out of date?

what's excessive?  your talking about 95%+ highly compressible text
files, with highly differentiable change sets and relatively slow
updates (vs. an active source code tree); i don't see any problems.
it won't accrue much at all imo, even after several years (decades?),
but i don't have numbers to back that up.

however it is possible to use grafting and other techniques to
prune/drop history, and still work with the repo.  git and the data
model will evolve too; last time i checked there was
specifications/steps toward integrating v4/v5 packfile format.

git does however, need a good library to bind to; the code right now
is... ehm... yeah...

> Then again.. if we could use something like that.. to checkout an old
> version of a package, that would be well worth it.  One thing that was
> available in gentoo that I miss in arch is the ability to have 2-3 version
> of a package available.

yeah, you could get any PKGBUILD you needed, with ease, and diff then
against anything else...

maybe even, dare i say, p2p share the immutable objects around...

C Anthony