On Sun, Nov 18, 2007 at 03:56:11PM +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:

* Pavel Machek [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Tue 2007-11-13 12:50:08, Mark Lord wrote:

quoted

Ingo Molnar wrote:

quoted

for example git-bisect was godsent. I remember that 
years ago bisection of a bug was a very laborous task 
so that it was only used as a final, last-ditch 
approach for really nasty bugs. Today we can 
autonomouly bisect build bugs via a simple shell 
command around "git-bisect run", without any human 
interaction! This freed up testing resources 

..

It's only a godsend for the few people who happen to be 
kernel developers
and who happen to already use git.

It's a 540MByte download over a slow link for everyone 
else.

Hmmm, clean-cg is 7.7G on my machine, and yes I tried 
git-prune-packed. What am I doing wrong?

"git-repack -a -d" gives me ~220 MB:

  $ du -s .git
  222064  .git

anyone who can download a 43 MB tar.bz2 tarball for a kernel release 
should be able to afford a _one time_ download size of 250 MB (the size 
of the current kernel.org git repository). If not, burning a CD or DVD 
and carrying it home ought to do the trick. Git is very 
bandwidth-efficient after that point - lots of people behind narrow 
pipes are using it - it's just the initial clone that takes time. And 
given all the history and metadata that the git repository carries (full 
changelogs, annotations, etc.) it's a no-brainer that kernel developers 
should be using it.

(and you can shrink the 250 MB further down by using shallow clones, 
etc.)

yes, some people complained when distros stopped doing floppy installs. 
Some people complained when distros stopped doing CD installs. Yes, i've 
myself done a 250+ MB download over a 56 kbit modem in the past, and 
while it indeed took overnight to finish, it's very much doable. It's 
not really qualitatively different from the 1.5 hours a kernel tar.bz2 
took to download.

Probably that once in a while, we should set up a complete tree in a
tar.bz2 format on kernel.org. It would help a lot of people behind small
pipes. I have been encountering problems with git-clone when the link is
unstable. After the smallest error, it erases everything and you have to
retry from start, which is quite frustrating and expensive.

At least, downloading a tar.bz2 with FTP would be easier and a lot more
reliable. Also, people could download it from their workplace and bring
it home.

Willy