Re: [PATCH v4 0/2] bundle URIs: design doc

[Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com>]

Hi Stolee

On 09/08/2022 16:50, Derrick Stolee wrote:
>> One small query - the document mentions CI farms as benefiting from this work
>> but my impression is that those commonly use shallow clones which are (quite
>> reasonably) not supported in this proposal.
> 
> There are two different kinds of CI farms.
> 
> The most common one is a SaaS CI system that provides machines on-demand,
> but each run starts from some "clean" state. For example, GitHub Actions
> runs CI builds of the Git project across a number of platforms. These
> machines need the source at HEAD, but do not need the full history. Further,
> they will erase the repository entirely at the end of the build, never
> fetching from those repositories. Thus, a shallow clone makes sense to
> minimize the data transfer. Bundles don't make sense here for multiple
> reasons, including that bundles must be closed under reachability and do
> not work for representing a shallow clone (see [1]). The other reason is
> that CI builds typically are triggered immediately after the commit appears
> on the origin Git server, so there is no time for a bundle provider to
> create a bundle representing that shallow clone.
> 
> [1] https://github.com/git/git/blob/c50926e1f48891e2671e1830dbcd2912a4563450/Documentation/technical/bundle-format.txt#L65-L69
> 
> The less common one is a private build farm. These machines are long-lived
> and controlled by the repository owner. They come pre-loaded with all of
> the software needed to build the repository. The best practice in this
> type of build farm is to keep a full clone of the repository in a well-
> known location and use incremental fetches to update the client repositories
> to download the commit necessary for the build. This type of build farm is
> typically self-hosted, but could also be hosted by a cloud provider. The
> bundle URI design allows ways to quickly bootstrap new build machines using
> a bundle provider (probably co-located with the build machines) as well as
> improving fetch times by creating frequent incremental bundles. The new
> commit being built is unlikely to exist immediately in the bundles, but it
> is unlikely to be too far ahead of any of the bundles.
> 
> While private build farms are less common, they do become necessary for
> large projects. Engineering teams that have the resources to self-host a
> build farm are likely to also have the resources to self-host a bundle
> server. They may not have the connections or desire to advertise those
> bundle server URIs from the origin Git server.
> 
> I hope this helps clarify my perspective as to why build farms using long-
> lived copies of the repository could take advantage of bundle URIs.

Yes it does, thanks for taking the time to explain that.

Phillip

> Thanks,
> -Stolee