[sugar] binary file in tamtam.git

[Bert Freudenberg]

On Feb 27, 2007, at 6:47 , James Bergstra wrote:

> So far, *we* are not using jhbuild, we are developing directly on  
> the OLPC machines.  Is this a major weirdness on our part?

Yes.

> And are you suggesting that we should maintain binaries of this  
> library and post them on some arbitrary website?

Almost, see below.

> Wouldn't that potentially defeat the olpc build versioning?

No.

> Also, if your point concerns binary files in git, then even in our  
> own repository aclient.so is a relatively small (?) concern at  
> 250K, what about our images and sounds?

We have the same problem in the etoys activity. Binaries just don't  
fit into git. *All* of the history is downloaded in your initial  
check-out, for etoys this is approaching 200 MB now.

What we are doing about this is moving the binaries into a Subversion  
repository. SVN handles binaries nicely, and you get versioning, too.

I did set up the subversion repository on a laptop.org machine  
already, just waiting for the admin to enable read access over http.

Once this is done, there are two possibilities. One would be to make  
two jhbuild modules - one for the binaries checking out from SVN, and  
one for the source code from git. One module could be made to depend  
on the other. The drawback is that you always have to remember to  
update and build both modules - which is a pain with Sugar already,  
you never know if the latest build fails because of genuine bugs or  
because of a dependency you did not update.

Alternatively, you could do the svn checkout while building, however  
this feels a bit odd to me to require network access in the build  
stage. Anyway, this would make it easier for your users.

The best of the two worlds would be if jhbuild supported "multi  
modules" that check out from two repositories at once. But AFAIK that  
is not supported.

- Bert -