Re: Proposal: an improvement to our Git and tarballs infrastructure

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Mon, 2013-04-22 at 12:08 +0200, Andrea Veri wrote:

> The real question is: are tarballs really useful in some way? JHBuild
> and the new build.gnome.org based on OSTree don't require tarballs at
> all, they both clone all the needed modules and do the build.

While I am pretty much a constant cheerleader in favor of this, it is a
huge change.  I designed the gnome-ostree build system to explicitly
only build from git, and the advantages of that are numerous.  It's
clearly the right choice.

= webkit git is enormous =

However, even with all that work, I still eventually added support for
building from tarballs.  In the GNOME sphere, the particularly
problematic module is WebkitGTK.  The upstream webkit git is over 4GB
because it has a **lot** of pregenerated HTML tests.  That's obviously
just too big, and something they should fix upstream.

But I'm not sure we can require everyone to download that.  One approach
is:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697818

Another is for the webkitgtk team to upload to a git repository without
tests.  I actually created one myself:
https://git.gnome.org/browse/webkitgtk-tarball-releases/

But it was a bit painful to do as a non-maintainer, so I eventually did:
https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-ostree/commit/?id=d185a9e530f5438e7a0f41f8083e17591a5431e7

If the webkitgtk maintainers were on board though, It could help a lot.

= Downstreams that really want tarballs =

Many distribution systems tend to accept tarballs as the canonical
source input (Debian packages, RPM, OpenEmbedded, etc.).  We have to
keep them in mind here, and whatever we can do on our side to ease the
pain, we should.

See also: http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/upstream_git_repositories/
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2011-February/148676.html
http://githubredir.debian.net/