4 ms·

Out of curiosity, what is the gist of your setup? Why is this incarnation such a departure from the general case?

Xylakant 12y ago
The output of the build is basically a tool in itself. So most people don't need the build process, just the resulting tool. The input changes on pretty much a monthly basis and is not easily versioned. I could set up all dev machines to support the build and everybody could build it themselves from sources, but that would require me to * install all the required instruments for the ritual rain dance * teach the whole team how to do the ritual rain dance * support the people that break an arm or a leg doing the ritual rain dance So I prefer perform the dance on my machine, collect the tool and point the main dev environment to the right location. It's all scripted, so I kick off the job and grab a coffee. However, I want to keep old instances around so I can track when bugs crept in, so I can't just go overwrite the result, so I need to adjust the pointer every time. If I could just check the tool in with the regular dev setup that would be much easier, but - since we're using git - that would blow up quite quickly and overwhelm my disk space. (And folks would kill me for filling up their disks as well - rightfully so). That's something SVN or another centralized VCS would handle much more gracefully. In a gist, I have a use-case for fairly stupid versioned file storage with a push/pull api. No complicated merging, no branching, nothing. git-annex could do, but is overkill. There are some better solutions to what we're currently doing, but there's so many yaks to shave and so few razors.
- pyre 12y ago
  > That's something SVN or another centralized VCS would handle much more gracefully. Subversion handles this gracefully because you don't download all of the repository's history to your machine. It's a trade-off that you're talking about here. Most people are ok with losing the ability to check in 500MB files in order to gain the decentralization of having a full copy of the repo (and not needing to query the server just to view history).
- gknoy 12y ago
  Thanks for such a good explanation. When I first saw artifacts of things generated by code in our repo, I had a big WTF moment, but it made a lot of sense once someone pointed out that it was Rather Handy for catching bugs in the code that does the generation.

The output of the build is basically a tool in itself. So most people don't need the build process, just the resulting tool. The input changes on pretty much a monthly basis and is not easily versioned. I could set up all dev machines to support the build and everybody could build it themselves from sources, but that would require me to * install all the required instruments for the ritual rain dance * teach the whole team how to do the ritual rain dance * support the people that break an arm or a leg doing the ritual rain dance So I prefer perform the dance on my machine, collect the tool and point the main dev environment to the right location. It's all scripted, so I kick off the job and grab a coffee. However, I want to keep old instances around so I can track when bugs crept in, so I can't just go overwrite the result, so I need to adjust the pointer every time. If I could just check the tool in with the regular dev setup that would be much easier, but - since we're using git - that would blow up quite quickly and overwhelm my disk space. (And folks would kill me for filling up their disks as well - rightfully so). That's something SVN or another centralized VCS would handle much more gracefully. In a gist, I have a use-case for fairly stupid versioned file storage with a push/pull api. No complicated merging, no branching, nothing. git-annex could do, but is overkill. There are some better solutions to what we're currently doing, but there's so many yaks to shave and so few razors.

pyre 12y ago
> That's something SVN or another centralized VCS would handle much more gracefully. Subversion handles this gracefully because you don't download all of the repository's history to your machine. It's a trade-off that you're talking about here. Most people are ok with losing the ability to check in 500MB files in order to gain the decentralization of having a full copy of the repo (and not needing to query the server just to view history).
gknoy 12y ago
Thanks for such a good explanation. When I first saw artifacts of things generated by code in our repo, I had a big WTF moment, but it made a lot of sense once someone pointed out that it was Rather Handy for catching bugs in the code that does the generation.