[Buildbot-devel] Behavior of mode=copy

[Stephen Davis]

On May 12, 2008, at 7:25 AM, bugs at almad.net wrote:

> I've tried to speed up mode=copy for Mercurial backend (but I think  
> this affects most of distributed VC's): cp -rp copies also .hg with  
> whole repository history into build, which is not needed and causes  
> update to be *lot* slower.

While apparently more important for VCs that keep the entire  
repository history locally, a VC-aware "copy" operation would benefit  
CVS, SVN, etc. as well by avoiding each VC's specific administrative  
directories.

> Mercurial has build-in command archive, which just copies active  
> revision to another directory, which I think is more usable for this  
> case (and for my case speeds up update from 1 hour to 3 minutes).  
> I've attached my patch to #263.

I'd think that having the VC-specific code implement the copy  
operation would be the right way to do this.  For example, a  
subversion mode would be like "cp -rp" but it would exclude the .svn  
folders.

That's probably more than you were planning on tackling but perhaps  
you could file an enhancement request so that all VCs benefit.

stephen