Hello, everyone. It's my pleasure to announce that with a majority vote the QA team has accepted a new policy. The accepted wording is:
Total size of 'files' subdirectory of a package should not be larger than 32 KiB. If the package needs more auxiliary files, they should be put into SRC_URI e.g. via tarballs. (the total size being computed as a sum of apparent file sizes) The relevant policy vote is finishing at bug #633758 [1]. The CI reports [2] were updated to report packages whose 'files' directories exceed 64 KiB, to avoid adding many new warnings at once. The limit will be lowered down to 32 KiB as packages are fixed to comply with the new policy. At the same time, I would like to explicitly remind developers that the spirit of the policy is 'do not let "files" grow large', not 'make sure you're one byte less than 32769.' Do not argue that your package exceeds the limit only by few bytes -- even if it gets close to the limit, then it means it's way too large. Motivation ========== Repoman & pkgcheck so far checked for a single file in 'files' directory that exceeded 20 KiB in size. This check has been criticized multiple times, most notably because it was triggered on packages with a single large-ish file but at the same time permitted packages to have a lot of small-ish files, with the latter consuming much more space. Furthermore, some developers explicitly worked around the check by splitting large patches into two smaller parts. The new policy aims to serve the same purpose but be more fair by counting the total size of all files. Rationale ========= At this moment, syncing the repository implies fetching 'files' directories of all packages, even though the relevant files are used only when a ebuild referencing them is being built. This means that our users fetch many files that they will never use -- either because they don't need the package in question, or because the file belongs to an old version. For example, 'du -h app-shells/bash/files' states 232K while only three of those files are used by the newest version, and everything else are patches for old versions. And in case of bash, we're keeping those versions pretty much 'forever'. The new policy mostly targets large patchsets and files relevant to old package versions. By removing them from the repository, we're hoping to reduce the growth of its size a bit and reduce the amount of data transferred via rsync. [1]:https://bugs.gentoo.org/633758 [2]:https://qa-reports.gentoo.org/output/gentoo-ci/output.html -- Best regards, Michał Górny
