[RFC] kbfiles: an extension to track binary files with less wasted bandwidth

Greg Ward greg-hg at gerg.ca
Sun Aug 7 17:31:32 CDT 2011


On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 10:44 AM, Benjamin Pollack <benjamin at fogcreek.com> wrote:
>> So that gets me to my first gripe with kbfiles/largefiles, which is
>> that you (Fog Creek) have almost completely erased the record of my
>> contribution. It's one thing to fork a project for your own needs, but
>> it's something else entirely to erase the origins of that code from
>> the historical record. I have no objection to the fork. I am a bit
>> unhappy that you have not tried very much to contribute changes back
>> upstream (i.e. to me). But I am most unhappy that you have nearly
>> erased me from the history. That's not cool.
>
> I'll let Andrew respond to the rest of this email later, but I felt
> that I had to respond to this part.
>
> You're assuming a lot of malice where there is none.

I was pretty sure there was no malice involved, just history
truncation. And I could hardly call myself a version control geek if I
was *not* offended by history truncation.

> Prior to the push that we've been doing over the last few months, our
> fork of bfiles was extremely tightly integrated into Kiln.  As such,
> it was part of the general Kiln repository at Fog Creek, and we didn't
> see a lot of point in submitting a bunch of Kiln-specific changes
> upstream to you.

Ahh, OK, now it makes more sense.

> There weren't honestly many core changes, past the
> ones that we did submit on this mailing list as part of our
> sponsorship of Mercurial hacking at the University of Toronto,

Thanks again for sponsoring that work!

> When, several months ago, we decided to break these changes out again
> to try to get them included into core Mercurial, we didn't have a
> history of (k)bfiles that was easy to separate from the rest of Kiln.
> So we truncated the history, made a new repository so that we could
> use kbfiles as a subrepository, and have been hacking on that.  Since
> Mercurial has not pulled in the history of another repository in a
> *long* time (I see it happening once, back in 2006), I didn't see a
> problem with this, because I assumed we'd be submitting a single patch
> at the end of the day anyway.

1) You could probably use 'hg convert' with a filemap to extract the
history of kbfiles from Kiln's history.
2) But maybe that's not worth the bother, since Matt is unlikely to
accept a request to pull the entire history of largefiles.
3) But then Matt said we should keep a separate repo for archaelogical
reasons, and IMHO that repo should be bfiles + kbfiles + largefiles
for best accuracy. As long as there are no changesets in the
Kiln-specific history of kbfiles where someone at Fog Creek
accidentally committed nuclear launch codes or the passwords to your
public web server, there's no technical reason not to do that.

> One thing missing from the repository right now, which we just
> discussed yesterday, is a CONTRIBUTORS file.  That should include you,
> and the University of Toronto, and the UCOSP program, and Unity 3D,
> and Fog Creek, and many others who have contributed.  We'll also need
> to fix the copyright headers, exactly as you mention in a previous
> email.  But this was oversight, not malice.

The lack of copyright headers is also my fault. I specifically did not
complain about that, because I knew damn well who hadn't gotten around
to adding copyright headers: me!

Also, the CONTRIBUTORS file has a small error: I am *not* the author
of the bigfiles extension. I am the author of bfiles.

BTW, if you guys need some documentation, the bfiles repo has it. I
don't know how much applies to largefiles, but it sounds like a lot of
it.

Greg


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