Re: Is there any way to delete old commits?

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Mon, Feb 2, 2015, at 01:40 PM, Jonathan Dieter wrote:
> I'm the system administrator for a school in Beirut that has over 100 
> seats running Fedora.  Currently we're using kickstarts for initial 
> install, ansible for configuration, and some fancy footwork with offline 
> updates to make sure the systems get upgraded on shutdown.  With all 
> this, we have issues with systems getting restarted while updating and 
> other strange things.
>
> I'd really like to start using OSTree to make sure we're using 
> consistent images and I've managed to get a perfect image set up, but 
> I've run into a stumbling block.  Our image runs at somewhere between 
> 15GB - 20GB.  If I push out an updated image once a week or so, there 
> will come a point in the not so distant future where the history is 
> ridiculously large.

Note that OSTree's an object store, so commits basically
only store "new objects" (modified or new files, plus some fixed metadata
overhead).

But yes, at some point it does grow large, and you don't need to carry
the history.  Something crucial to note is that you can at any point
just blow away a repository and create it fresh, and clients can update
from it.  All the client cares about is finding a commit with a newer
timestamp.

However, there are uid/gid issues to keep in mind; see
the passwd/group related options here:
https://github.com/projectatomic/rpm-ostree/blob/master/doc/treefile.md

I just filed:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=743882