Re: value of gdbadmin effort to create gdb daily/weekly source tarballs

Frank Ch. Eigler via Gdb
2024-04-15T18:29:10Z

Hi, Joel -

> > Would you like me to check logs as to how many accesses to this have
> > taken place? (A very rough brief search indicated 99%+ were bots like
> > search engines and ai ingesters.)
>
> If this isn't too much effort, that would give some factual data
> that would hopefully turn the decision into a no-brainer.

Doing a more thorough search:

% zgrep pub/gdb/snapsho sourceware-combined_log* | fgrep .xz | egrep -iv 'bingbot|googlebot|amazonbot|gptbot|yandex|semrush|googleother|3BSZgF|crawler|8.219|8.222'| wc -l
12969
% zgrep pub/gdb/snapsho sourceware-combined_log* | fgrep .xz | egrep -i 'bingbot|googlebot|amazonbot|gptbot|yandex|semrush|googleother|3BSZgF|crawler|8.219|8.222' | wc -l
35001

i.e., 35001 tarball/diff downloads by known-to-be-bots and 12969 by
not-definitely-bots, over three months. But I'm pretty sure most of
those 12969's are also bots, just not identifying themselves with
user-agent or other obvious-definite-botness signs.

> Personally, I'm having a hard time seeing this as being sufficiently
> useful to be worth the effort (speaking as the only person who gets
> the alerts when the process breaks, and thus goes to fix it afterwards).

Yeah.

> [...]
> On the other hand, it does act a periodic test of the script being
> src-release.sh script staying operational. But if that were the only
> reason we had, we can preserve this as a pure test, where we do
> a periodic source packaging, but instead of saving it for people
> to download, we simple discard it.

Or: try running it monthly rather than daily, dropping the diffs.

- FChE