[gambit-list] Bootstrapping from the Gambit github repo

Marc Feeley feeley at iro.umontreal.ca
Thu Apr 12 20:30:02 EDT 2012


On 2012-04-12, at 4:53 PM, Mikael wrote:

> While I believe you considered this already - so the issue with uploading these c files all the time, is that the total repo, including any clones of it made, would grow in size very fast, because a great number of versions of those .c files would be in the version history.
> 
> Does Git perhaps have some kind of "permanent unlimited erase" feature where you can actually remove file commits completely (from all the repo incl its history)? I'd suppose it does. 
> 
> Though, for this to be meaningful, Git would require to propagate those erases (to github from your local machine and so on) on git pull/push. This could or could not exist, at least it's by far not an unreasonable feature to exist, I suppose?
> 
> If all this exists, you could make a script that would go through all versions of the entire git repo and erase all of those .c files in that fashion, except for the very most recent version (so cloners always get the newest set) and those that belong to very major Gambit versions (like, N.N.0:s or so) (so people can always have old Gambit versions readily compilable).
> 
> Checked on #git, they said this can be done with git log filename and filter-branch  , and said there's clear examples in man filter-branch .
> 
> Brgds

But what would be the advantage of this over a plain old .tar.gz which contains exactly what is needed to build the system?  These .tar.gz files, which I call "releases", are available for all releases of Gambit that were made (since 3.0 at least).

The allure of a git repo is that you can easily keep up to date with the most recent changes to the repo, and possibly contribute changes to the head of the repo.  It is nice also to be able to move back and forth in the commit history to determine when bugs were introduced.

Marc




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