On Thu, 2004-10-14 at 17:05 -0400, Mark Loeser wrote:
> I agree, this would be a very good policy to put into place.  Removing
> all of the patches from the tree will help to reduce its size, by how
> much has already been a topic of debate, but it would help regardless.
> If it doesn't make that big of a difference now, it has the potential of
> stopping this from becoming a bigger problem in the future.

I know that I have mentioned this before, but having a set of -release
trees would also alleviate much of this.  There would be less reason for
keeping around so many older ebuilds in the -current tree, as they would
still be available in the -release trees.  The real concern with any
separation of the tree is how do we keep them all up to date with
security patches and such.  This would still need to be addressed and I
am still working on a good solution.

> The tree is growing at a very large rate and rsync times are taking a
> lot longer now than they did for me a year or so ago.  Removing all of
> the patches from the tree will definitely help this, but I think other
> policies should be more strictly inforced as well.  There are some very
> large files in the tree currently that aren't patches, like enormous
> Changelogs for a few packages, and also a lot of old ebuilds that are
> sitting around for some packages.  It'd be nice if the tree was kept as
> clean as possible to keep rsync times down as much as possible.

Perhaps some way of moving the ChangeLog files themselves out of the
tree and into some other location where they could be pulled as-needed.
This would be a good place to start, as the ChangeLog is not used by
portage itself and is only informational for the users and developers.
The only thing that would need to be changed is the -l option to portage
would need to be modified to pull the data from the web (or wherever)
instead of the tree.

The real problem we run into with almost any solution is to get any real
gains we have to make drastic changes to the tree which could break
older releases and people's installs that haven't been keeping up to
date.  As a good example, when we make changes to portage, they have to
be done incrementally and have to be able to co-exist with the way
things are currently, and also the way things have been, otherwise we
risk really causing trouble for many of our users.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Operations/QA Manager
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux