[pkg-nvidia-devel] Cleaning out tarballs directory

[Andreas Beckmann]

Russ Allbery wrote:
> A checkout of the tarballs directory is currently 2.3GB, which is kind of
> insane, but Subversion makes it hard to check something into a directory
> without checking it out.

Current svn supports sparse checkouts:

    svn checkout --depth empty \
        svn://svn.debian.org/svn/pkg-nvidia/tarballs tarballs

will get the directory only but no files. The available files could be
listed with

    svn ls tarballs

and a specific file could be checked out with

    svn up tarballs/foobar.0.8.15.tar.gz

(The inverse operation, making a checkout more sparse, i.e.
removing/hiding checked out files/directories without deleting (as in
svn rm) them, seems to be not yet implemented.)

But doing this manually every time a file is added will probably be
inconvenient, so removing the old ones is probably better.

> I vote we svn rm all the tarballs that are older than what's currently in
> stable, and probably also the intermediate versions that aren't in stable,
> testing, or unstable.  The old tarballs will still be in the repository,
> but the checkout won't be ginormous.

The version currently in oldstable should be kept, too.
I would also keep the intermediate versions between stable and unstable,
or, if these are still too many, at least one year of history + the last
releases of each major version (i.e. out of 123.45.{66,77,88} at least
123.45.88 should be kept).

You should probably add a README file to the tarballs directory listing
all removed tarballs and the last revision before they were removed, so
one can easily get them from the repository without digging too deep
into the history.


Andreas