Idea: Git as basis for future CTAN and TeX Live. (Discuss here or at tomorrow's TeX Hour)

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Jonathan,

> Thank you for your interest and for spotting the typo. Tomorrow's TeX Hour
> will be Thursday 24 June, at 6:30 to 7:30pm UK time. As that is at 2:30am

Ah, so that is in about 22h - maybe I can get up already, or I am awake
still, but probably not.

> My set of files was defined to avoid documentation files, and files that
> aren't used by anyone, and binary executables. In other words, only files

That is a very vague category and would not be useful besides for pure
typesetting tasks, but well, for your convenience I made an experiment:
- install all of TL
- remove from texmf-dist directory the documentation and source
  directories (doc, source)
- git init && git add . && git commit -m "initial commit"

After that I get a 2.3G .git directory


> We don't know that yet. It all depends on how big 'all useful texlive input
> files' is, over the years.

If it would be only the tex/mf etc input files that would be good, but
the biggest part nowadays are the font files which are binary blobs for
git.

> And there need not be any history, and so no need to use --force! An
> 'orphan' commit has no parents. We can create as many of these as we wish!
> Not just the usual first commit to the main branch.

Thanks, I know about that, but if we create multiple orphan commits the
repository will grow anyway over time, and with orphan commits even
worse.

(BTW, I have used git as distribution mechanism already several times
for other projects, I know how it works ;-)

> Please recall that I'm intending in this thread to use git as a distributed
> peer-to-peer content addressable store. I'll use its version control

The question is - what do you want to do with it afterwards? How would
this be actually used.

> to schedule a future TeX Hour meeting at a time that suits you (as long it

Best would probably be around 2pm for you which is 10pm for me. Other
slots are 10pm for you with is 6pm for me, or so ...

Best

Norbert

--
PREINING Norbert                              https://www.preining.info
Fujitsu Research  +  IFMGA Guide  +  TU Wien  +  TeX Live  + Debian Dev
GPG: 0x860CDC13   fp: F7D8 A928 26E3 16A1 9FA0 ACF0 6CAC A448 860C DC13