On Tue, 30 Aug 2011 11:10:10 -0500, Zach Pfeffer <zach.pfeffer@linaro.org> wrote:
> There's no reason to do it now, because its solving the wrong problem.
> The problem is sha's disappear. We use sha's because the provide
> immovable references to the state of a set of git trees so that people
> can reproduce builds exactly. We don't need the change to tag a build
> after its been deemed correct, we just need to implement a function to
> tag across the gits so that all the shas continue to exist.

I'm sorry, but I'm not sure what course of action you are advocating
here?

It sounds like you are advocating using a model where we use tags to
ensure that the referenced revisions are reachable from a head, and then
refer to the sha ids of the revisions in the manifest. Is that correct?

I think what he is saying is that everytime we produce a pinned-manifest.xml we would at best be able to prevent those revisions from getting garbage collected.

I think thats a reasonable vision in general. My main concern to start with is about tag inflation. Is there a thing like a 'hidden' tag in git that would allow that folks looking at a tree to still spot the 'real' tags and only see all the pinned/manifest tags upon request?