Multiples of latency
Today someone asked me to take a look at an Evolution enhancement that's just begging to get into trunk. Since this is a Gnome program in a subversion repository I've commenced the process of cloning the repository so I can look at the issue against the current head.
At the current rate I should have a copy of the repository by early tomorrow morning, in order to be able to start looking at it. Of course today is when I actually do have some time to spare, and I hope to be fast asleep at the time when I expect this to finish.
Presumably subversion isn't this slow for everyone, but since my latency to their repository is 300mS I'm probably on the worst end the pain, with each commit seemingly taking around a second. It sure would be nice if subversion provided some kind of chunked compression of these five-year-old commits, so I could be bandwidth limited, rather than latency challenged.
The addition of a day to the checkout of a software project must be a significant barrier to entry for anyone considering contributing. It makes it much less likely to be opportunistic.
So far I'm up to r3600 in 75 minutes. That's 75 minutes that I could have spent actually looking at the code, but now it's time for me to go and vote for me...
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http://git-mirror.gnome.org/
http://git-mirror.gnome.org/
Ahhh! Thank you my anonymous friend!
Excellent. So lets have a race, starting now (my SVN checkout is up to r18571 and I'll start a Git checkout now...
OK. The Git checkout has finished now, and the Subversion is still at r18857. I guess I will be able to fiddle with it while watching the NZ election results scroll past :-)
Workaround
You could also checkout on a low-latency Debian machine (alioth, merkel, whatever) and rsync the checkout.
And in fact I tried that approach
I tried to check out on a machine in North America, but I was bitten by some problem with git-svn on there. I didn't actually think of using a Debian machine for it, but I should have, and the latency would have been even lower than the North American option.
Must think of that for the future.
Meanwhile, the checkout I started before I wrote this is still continuing. It's at r26784 or so now, and only has 8000 or so to go. I had time during the vote counting to even hack on the patches so they apply to the evolution version in Sid, and to verify that CalDAV support for Tasks and Notes in evolution is certainly possible.
And I'll keep the Evolution checkout around, so that perhaps I can fiddle some more with it in the coming few months too.
Cheers,
Andrew.