[pacman-dev] [PATCH] libmakepkg/source/git: Use --bare with a refspec instead of --mirror

[Johannes Löthberg]

Excerpts from Allan McRae's message of January 20, 2019 22:30:
> On 21/1/19 2:30 am, Eli Schwartz wrote:
>> On 1/20/19 9:13 AM, Johannes Löthberg wrote:
>>> This pulls in all of the branches in the same way as --mirror, but won't
>>> also pull in all of the non-branch references.
>>>
>>> For example the refs/pull/*/{head,merge} references that GitHub creates
>>> for every PR that has ever been opened against the repo can pull in a
>>> very large amount of objects that aren't useful, and which can massively
>>> inflate a repository.
>> It's entirely possible that people use this to cherry-pick a patch from
>> a PR branch. That being said, I do consider it reasonable to not fetch
>> this by default and pull in the patchfile via source=() if you do need
>> it... but I wonder how often people might be relying on this behavior.
> 
> I have done that in the past - I found it to be good documentation of
> where the patch came from rather than using a local copy of the patch.
> 

For that I much prefer just using GitHub .patch URLs in the sources 
array, which will get you a file that you can just throw at git-am, 
which not only tells you where it's from, you can just copy it and 
remove the .patch at the end to see the code review of it.

Depending on non-branch or tag refs that by default aren't cloned feel 
rather icky to me overall, but maybe that's just me.

> I'd like to see an example of what is meant by "massively inflate"?
> What percentage are we talking?
> 

I distinctly remember having cases where there were old PRs from before 
a rebase that ended up pulling in multiple gigabytes of data, but I 
cannot seem to figure out which repos they were anymore.

Of the larger repos I've looked at quickly it seems the difference for 
most of them are roughly 100-500MB.  For Linus' linux repo the 
difference is 446MB, 113MB for rust.

Since I can't really find the really nasty cases anymore, I guess you 
can feel free to reject it, though I still think that the change is more 
morally correct, and even a 500MB difference can affect some users.
-- 
Sincerely,
  Johannes Löthberg :: SA0DEM
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 1727 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/attachments/20190122/b86e1c74/attachment.sig>