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Bloated Repository & Source Downloads


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Hello. I'm somewhat new to the community (been lurking for a while), and have a nit to pick in the organisation, or rather the contents, of the source repository.

Specifically, I'm talking about all the Windows binaries that have absolutely no purpose on Mac or Linux.

It was save a lot of potential contributors a lot of pain and annoyance (especially those with slow connections or on internet plans with monthly data caps) if the repository was just source, assets and build scripts. Why can't all the windows prebuilt binaries/libraries be put in a separate repository for those who actually need them?

I realise that the biggest chunk of the repository is actually the assets, but the space taken up by the binaries is still rather significant.

Combining the contents of two repositories and pushing the result as a third is reasonably easy, but doing it the other way around (taking a bloated repository and cleaning it down to just what you need then pushing it) isn't.

I realise that the community is rather quiet a lot of the time and there's only a small number of people pushing the game forward, so I'd assume there'd be a bit of resistance to change. However, I'd still ask whoever's in charge of the project to consider cleaning up the repository. It may even gain you another developer or two.

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The autobuild functionality was designed for people without a good technical background (like artists and enthusiastic testers). Having them to perform more steps to play with the developer version would bypass the original goal for the autobuilder.

Besides: the binaries/system folder is only 500MB large (here on Windows) and I suppose that includes more than only windows binaries. Libraries don't even exceed 50MB. That is only 6% of the total repository size (which is ~10GB, but that includes a dozen of mods and varies a bit on which machine I look). I wouldn't call that significant honestly.

Edited by niektb
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The autobuild functionality was designed for people without a good technical background (like artists and enthusiastic testers). Having them to perform more steps to play with the developer version would bypass the original goal for the autobuilder.

Besides: the binaries/system folder is only 500MB large (here on Windows) and I suppose that includes more than only windows binaries. Libraries don't even exceed 50MB. That is only 6% of the total repository size (which is ~10GB, but that includes a dozen of mods and varies a bit on which machine I look). I wouldn't call that significant honestly.

Hmm, for me it's just 185MB. (Also note that that is the size on disk, i.e. not the size when downloading.)

In either case, we have been discussing and planning to try and change to using Git instead (which would include ways to only get the source code and not have the Windows-only binary files as well). That is dependent on having easy ways for people who need the binaries to get them, plus we have been waiting for our new server to be set up. Now we've started to get things set up on it though, so it might happen some time soon as long as other issues have a solution.

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Hmm, for me it's just 185MB. (Also note that that is the size on disk, i.e. not the size when downloading.)

In either case, we have been discussing and planning to try and change to using Git instead (which would include ways to only get the source code and not have the Windows-only binary files as well). That is dependent on having easy ways for people who need the binaries to get them, plus we have been waiting for our new server to be set up. Now we've started to get things set up on it though, so it might happen some time soon as long as other issues have a solution.

Ah, it seems that I had that folder bloated a bit with custom-built binaries+libraries (which you don't need if you don't compile the game on Windows) and a packaged mod (RotE, which is 60MB in itself). If I would remove that the size would be much closer (if not equal) to yours.

Edited by niektb
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<...> (which would include ways to only get the source code and not have the Windows-only binary files as well). That is dependent on having easy ways for people who need the binaries to get them, <...>

Future Design section of "Build and Deployment Environment" wiki page and the Trac tickets linked in it have some technical details.
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Also since we are using SVN and that supports partial checkouts you can just ignore the binaries/system folder and just check out everything else. Reading your SVN client documentation might be helpful (if you are using Apache Subversion 1.6+ it supports sparse directory exclusion (so you can actually ignore just that folder while updating everything else)).

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