[RFC] largefiles - "system-wide" cache

[Na'Tosha Bard]

2011/10/19 Greg Ward <greg-hg at gerg.ca>

> On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 4:38 PM, Carter, Eli <Eli.Carter at tektronix.com>
> wrote:
> > The largefiles extension talks a lot about a system-wide cache.  There
> are two problems with this.  First, this cache is per-user, not a
> system-wide.  And secondly, it is more accurately described as a 'store'
> than as a 'cache'.
>
> I have been thinking about sending in a patch to rename it to "user
> cache", but I had not realized that it's really a store. Thanks for
> clarifying!
>
> (In fact, I was going to propose moving it to ~/.cache/hg-largefiles,
> since after all "it's a cache, it should go in ~/.cache to clarify
> that it's safe to dispose of". Oops! Good thing I didn't get around to
> that.)
>
> > Regarding 'system-wide' vs 'per-user':
> > The extension assumes files are in the system cache, but if one user is
> cloning a repository from another user on the same machine, those files
> _won't_ be in the "system-wide" cache, and the clone winds up without the
> largefiles (and spews "Can't get file locally" errors).
>

Yes, I've seen that several times.  We need to fix it correctly . . .
somehow.  It only seems to work if you happen to have the same username and
password on both machines :-)

Ick. Sounds like we need more test cases.
>
> > Therefore, there are two things I'd like to see:
> >
> > 1: I'd like to have the extension populate $repo/.hg/largefiles in
> addition to ~/.largefiles (using hardlinks where possible), and reference it
> when looking for files.
>
> Seems reasonable. Actually I'd like someone to explain to me why we
> need two complete copies of all the largefiles on the local system.
> ;-) If that is in fact the case... so far I've mainly been reading the
> code rather than actually *using* largefiles.
>

One use case: If you do branch-by-cloning server-side for example, your
local clones can pull the largefiles they need out of the local cache rather
than re-download them.


> Tweak: it should be ~/.hg-largefiles, not ~/.largefiles.
>
> > 2: I'd like to have an --all-largefiles option for hg clone and hg pull
> that downloads all versions of all largefiles referenced by any changeset
> included in the transfer.
>
> Also seems reasonable, but it's unclear to me whether those downloaded
> revs belong in ~/.hg-largefiles or $repo/.hg/largefiles. The
> relationship between those two directories is still unclear to me.
>
> Greg


Cheers,
Na'Tosha


-- 
*Na'Tosha Bard*
Build & Infrastructure Developer | Unity Technologies

*E-Mail:* natosha at unity3d.com
*Skype:* natosha.bard
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