Re: Stats on Xen tarball downloads

["Roger Pau Monné" <roger.pau@citrix.com>]

On Wed, Feb 21, 2024 at 10:53:49PM +0000, Julien Grall wrote:
> Hi George,
> 
> On 21/02/2024 02:55, George Dunlap wrote:
> > On Mon, Feb 19, 2024 at 6:38 PM Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com> wrote:
> > > 
> > > On 19.02.2024 11:31, Roger Pau Monné wrote:
> > > > On Mon, Feb 19, 2024 at 06:01:54PM +0800, George Dunlap wrote:
> > > > > One of the questions we had with respect to changing our release
> > > > > practice (for instance, making the process more light-weight so that
> > > > > we could do a point release after every XSA) was, "How many people are
> > > > > actually using the tarballs?"
> > > > 
> > > > What would this more lightweight process involve from a downstream
> > > > PoV?  IOW: in what would the contents of the tarball change compared
> > > > to the current releases?
> > > 
> > >  From all prior discussion my conclusion was "no tarball at all".
> > 
> > Or at very least, the tarball would be a simple `git archive` of a
> > release tag.   Right now the tarball creation has a number of
> > annoyingly manual parts about it.
> At the moment we have the following steps:
> 
> 1) Checkout tag
> 2) Create the tarball
> 3) Check the source tarball can build
> 4) Sign the tarball
> 5) Upload it
> 
> I managed to script it so I have only two commands to execute (mostly
> because I build and sign on a different host).
> 
> AFAIU, your command 'git archive' will only replace 2. Am I correct? If so,
> it is not entirely clear how your proposal is going to make it better.

IMO building for release tarballs is easier than from a git checkout
(or archive).  It's a bit annoying to have to pre-download the
external project sources, now even more as QEMU is using git
submodules.

Most distro binary builders have infrastructure to deal with all this,
but requires a bit more logic in the recipe than a plain just fetch a
tarball and build from it.

Thanks, Roger.