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

Joel Brobecker via Gdb
2024-04-15T17:48:53Z

Hi Frank,

> Observing regular system activity on sourceware, the gdbadmin cron
> jobs to create the https://sourceware.org/pub/gdb/snapshots/ struck me
> as something that perhaps is no longer that useful. With git-archive
> being able to immediately generate tarballs of any version, with git
> diffs producing the deltas, is there any utility at all in still
> producing these tarballs?
>
> 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.

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).

A small remark perhaps: The source packages I believe are created
using the src-release.sh script, which does more than just tar-ing
the files from the repository. We do the same where we create
official releases, so the current process produces snapshot which
are closer to the releases than a simple tar-ing operation would do.
With that said, I personally have experience re-building both binutils
and GDB from repository rather than sources, and it's no problem.
So for me this is not a significant reason to justify preserving
this capability.

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.

--
Joel