Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Google Summer of Code

[Stefan Monnier]

>  7. Automatically prune all patchlogs that have been around for more than
>     50 revisions. That should be enough to find good ancestors for merges
>     and such. Perhaps a tunable variable on a branch per branch basis
>     would make sense.

AFAICT, the patchlogs (in Arch) don't need pruning; they just need a bit of
optimization:

- drop the log comments, the dates, ... (tla can fetch them from the archive
  if needed; I don't know of any case where the speed to get them is on the
  critical path).
- use fewer files.
- reduce redundancy.  Either manually or via gzip.
- maybe don't even include it in the working dirs, but only in the archives
  (where you don't need one per revision but only one per branch or even one
  per archive).

Not all of those are needed: as we'd seen, using a single patchlog file per
branch and gzipping it already gives a factor 10 reduction in disk size;
it's not clear that the rest is even needed.


        Stefan