[Buildbot-devel] State of mercurial support

[bugs at almad.net]

Hi,



after living on our fork for a while, we decided we could go back to upstream. However, I still found a lot of issues when using buildbot with hg, so I'd like to ask:



1) mode=update uses rm -rf && hg clone --rev. This is very slow for large repos; why is there not hg clone on first try and then only hg pull && hg update -r rev :



2) A while ago, I patched mode=copy to use hg archive instead of cp -rp. There is a ticket for it (#276), but from what I understood in discussion on maillist, this would break backward compatibility and build process for somes (who use svn info to extract things).



Good solution here (IMHO) is to create new mode (mode=export?), in which supported backends will be using shallow-copy-of-only-versioned-files-like behavior from local master (svn export, hg archive, ...). I'd write it for hg, but I'm not familiar with buildbot's infrastructure enough to write whole new mode with tests. I'm willing to do a work on it, but I'd need a guidance; anyone willing to guide/contribute/write?



Problem is that with all current modes, for our repo (~300-400MB), using buildbot is *very* slow and it's response is far from being responsive enough.



Thanks,



Almad