[Pbuilder-maint] Re: pbuilder: cowdancer/cowbuilder status update

[Junichi Uekawa]

Hi,

> > Another difference I noticed is that fl-cow takes a list of
> > directories to protect in FL_COW, and seems to copy files
> > unconditionally on 'open'.
> > 
> > cowdancer caches a list of i-nodes so that it won't try to break
> > hardlinks more than once. (cow-shell does this much work).
> 
> Nice. I'm not sure both tools need to be in debian. How mature is
> cowdancer - can it replace fl-cow at this point? (fl-cows primary use is
> to be told 'these paths may contain hardlinked files, please unhardlink
> any of them on write').

cowdancer has been installed in Debian for a while, but it is newer
than fl-cow.  From the point of view of cowdancer implementor, fl-cow is missing some functionality that is required in cowdancer. 

The users of fl-cow will need the following change:

1. use cow-shell instead of cow-script.

2. get used to having a .ilist (this is the file that caches inode
   contents) file after running cowdancer.

3. get used to cow-shell only protecting files below the current
   directory (which is what gets populated in .ilist)

4. they are not bug-to-bug compatible.  cowdancer is currently only
   really tested on ppc and amd64.


Attached is a sample script that uses cowdancer and apt-get source:

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BTW, I found it nice to be able to see a graph of popcon results, not that it matters:

http://people.debian.org/~igloo/popcon-graphs/index.php?packages=fl-cow+cowdancer&show_installed=on&show_vote=on&show_old=on&show_recent=on&show_nofiles=on&want_legend=on&beenhere=1

regards,
	junichi
-- 
dancer@{debian.org,netfort.gr.jp}   Debian Project