[webkit-dev] An incremental approach (was Re: UPDATED Re: Version control survey)

[Evan Martin]

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 4:10 AM, Tor Arne Vestbø
<tor.arne.vestbo at nokia.com> wrote:
> I've done some prototyping on how to do a smaller mirror, using git
> submodules or tools such as git-annex or git-media. So far the issue is that
> if you want to commit to SVN using git-svn none of these techniques can be
> used, which makes the smaller mirror less useful.
>
> There was a thread on the git mailing list that mentioned the possibly of
> writing a git-fast-import/export backend to solve this, ie to lazily
> populate the layout-test results, but I haven't had time to look into that
> further.
>
> So the conclusion so far is that it's not feasible to keep an incremental
> SVN-mirror that does on-the-fly pruning of layout-test results (into
> submodules or similar) while still being usable with git-svn. Ideas welcome!

Technically it is ultimately possible -- git-svn just speaks the svn
protocol so it certainly could be hacked to work with subsets of the
upstream repository.  That would allow you to check out the
non-layouttest source code and make changes that don't touch layout
tests, at least.  For full credit you'd want to teach it how to work
with a separate layout test repo as well, of course.  I'm not
volunteering.