On 06/11/11 20:28, Jakub Narebski wrote:
Note that for gitPAN each "distribution" (usually but not always
corresponding to single Perl module) is in separate repository.
The dependencies are handled by CPAN / CPANPLUS / cpanm client
(i.e. during install).
Thank you for your interest, Jakub, and also for this information. With
TeX there's a difficult which Perl, I think, does not have. With TeX we
process documents, which may demand specific versions of packages.
LaTeX users are concerned that move on to a later version will cause
documents to break.
Putting all DVD (is it "TeX Live" DVD by the way?) into single
repository would put quite a bit of stress to git; it was created for
software development (although admittedly of large project like Linux
kernel), not 4GB+ trees.
I'm impressed by how well git manages it. It took about 15 minutes to
build the 4GB tree, and it was disk speed rather than CPU which was the
bottleneck.
Once you've done that, it is then possible and sensible to select
suitable interesting subsets, such as releases of a particular
package. Users could even define their own subsets, such as "all
resources needed to process this file, exactly as it processes on my
machine".
This could be handled using submodules, by having superrepository that
consist solely of references to other repositories by the way of
submodules... plus perhaps some administrativa files (like README for
whole CTAN, or search tool, or DVD install, etc.)
This could be the used to get for example contents of DVD from 2010.
We may be at cross purposes. My first task is get the DVD tree into
git, performing necessary transformations such as expanding zip files
along the way. Breaking the content into submodules can, I believe, be
done afterwards.
With DVDs from several years it could take several hours to load
everything into git. For myself, I'd like to do that once, more or less
as a batch process, and then move on to the more interesting topics.
Getting the DVD contents into git is already a significant piece of work.
Once done, I can them move on to what you're interested in, which is
organising the material. And I hope that others in the TeX community
will get involved with that, because I'm not building this repository
just for myself.
But even though submodules (c.f. Subversion svn:external, Mecurial
forest extension, etc.) are in Git for quite a bit of time, it doesn't
have best user interface.
In addition, many TeX users have a TeX DVD. If they import it into a
git repository (using for example my script) then the update from 2011
to 2012 would require much less bandwidth.
???
A quick way to bring your TeX distribution up to date is to do a delta
with a later distribution, and download the difference. That's what git
does, and it does it well. So I'm keen to convert a TeX DVD into a git
repository, and then differences can be downloaded.
Finally, I'd rather be working within git that modified copy of the
ISO when doing the subsetting. I'm pretty sure that I can manage to
pull the small repositories from the big git-CTAN repository.
No you cannot. It is all or nothing; there is no support for partial
_clone_ (yet), and it looks like it is a hard problem.
Nb. there is support for partial _checkout_, but this is something
different.
From what I know, I'm confident that I can achieve what I want using
git. I'm also confident that my approach is not closing off any
possible approached. But if I'm wrong you'll be able to say: I told you so.
Commit = tree + parent + metadata.
Actually, any number of parents, including none. What metadata do I
have to provide? At this time nothing, I think, beyond that provided by
the name of a reference (to the root of a tree).
I think you would very much want to have linear sequence of trees,
ordered via DAG of commits. "Naked" trees are rather bad idea, I think.
As I recall the first 'commit' to the git repository for the Linux
kernel was just a tree, with a reference to that tree as a tag. But
no commit.
That was a bad accident that there is a tag that points directly to a
tree of _initial import_, not something to copy.
Because git is a distributed version control system, anyone who wants to
can create such a directed acyclic graph of commits. And if it's useful
I'll gladly add it to my copy of the repository.
best regards
Jonathan
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