Part of the original intent of the mail was just to bring to light the
disparity between the documentation and experience (wrt the default
value) -- I had no configured value and portage was trying to clone the
entire history of the repo instead of a shallow start. Since I really
appreciate the Gentoo documentation and have relied on it for
installation and any system maintenance, I just wanted to bring this to
light.
I understand that git history will build over time -- I'm less concerned
with (eventual) disk usage than I am with the speed of `emerge --sync`,
which (and perhaps I'm sorely mistaken) appeared to be faster using git
than rsync -- hence my choice of git over rsync (the discussion at
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1009562.html shows me to not be
alone in this experience).
Having the changelogs available also comes off as a positive for me --
I'm just plain curious.
-d
------ Original Message ------
From: "Mick" <michaelkintz...@gmail.com>
To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org
Sent: 2018-07-06 10:01:20
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Portage, git and shallow cloning
On Friday, 6 July 2018 08:29:26 BST Martin Vaeth wrote:
Davyd McColl <dav...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 1) `sync-depth` has been deprecated (should now use `clone-depth`)
The reason is that sync-depth was meant to be effective for
every sync, i.e. that with sync-depth=1 the clone should stay shallow.
However, it turned out that this caused frequent/occassional errors
with git syncing when earlier chunks are needed.
So they decided to drop this, and the value is only used for the
initial cloning and ignored from then on. Due to this change of
effect, it has been renamed.
> 2) with the option missing, portage was fetching the entire history
Yes, but even with this option, your history will fill up over time.
Only the initial cloning will go faster and need less space.
> 2) I believe that the original intent of defaulting to a shallow
clone was
> a good idea
Due to the point mentioned above, this is not very useful anymore.
Moreover, now that full checksumming is supported for rsync, the only
advantage of using git is that you get the history (in particular
ChangeLogs).
The lack of disk space on some of my systems, metered and slow
bandwidth and
no need to know what every individual commit and reason for it was, had
me
sticking to using rsync, after a short sting on using git.
I don't think anyone recommended git unless good reasons for one's use
case
make it an optimal choice.
--
Regards,
Mick
