Burning Chrome

But if you insist on pulling trees by dialup...

(which I did, and many thanks to bsmedberg for the -z 9 advice)

Although I was successful this time in pulling the tree, I'm thinking there are some little tweaks we can do to make the process more friendly for dialup developers (an oxymoron in the 21st century, but I fit in the category).

(1) SeamonkeyAll is a huge beast to pull. One foul-up in the pull (such as a disconnect that you don't catch in time), and your whole pull is hosed. I wonder if there's some way to identify all the directories SeamonkeyAll actually grabs for the user, stuff it into a list that the make process can parse while pulling, and then store that separately. That way, if an error happens, you still have a portion of the tree, and a logical point to restart.

(2) Pull-by-date should become mandatory in a dialup pull. I'm glad to see the .mozconfig script has that, and it should be used. I didn't use it earlier, and now I regret it.

(3) The client.mk process doesn't have a restart option. This is not good. Of course, the assumption inherent is that the checkout and/or build process failed because something was horked on the process, not in something beyond the process's control.

I'm not advocating an automatic restart. The developer doing a CVS update will be able to tell what's really at fault for a bad pull.

Could a script be written to (a) set the pull date, and (b) log which portions have or have not been pulled yet for said pull date? That way, we could include a special option in .mozconfig (--may-disconnect), which would run this script each time the client.mk process started up. Concurrent with a little user feedback (answering one or two questions about the last pull, and whether he wants a fresh update or to complete an earlier update), it would be a huge timesaver.

Broadband users would be advocated not to enable this option. :) Opinions?

Posted by WeirdAl at September 1, 2004 11:27 PM