[arch-projects] [devtools] archrelease and slow `svn copy`

[Lukas Fleischer]

Not sure if this has already been discussed elsewhere.

All, some or none of you might have noticed that archrelease became way
slower with some of the recent commits (probably mainly 8384ad84, didn't
research in detail). My guess is that this is caused by doing a WC -> WC
copy (see `svn copy --help` for details) instead of creating a simple
tag which is insanely slow. If you're interested in details, check [1]
and [2].

Possible solutions that I can think of:

* Do not `svn copy` but just remove and copy the files. That way, we
  could keep the single commit but would lose history. Sucks badly.

* Create simple tags [3] using the "URL -> URL" version of `svn copy`.
  Damned fast, but we'd have to use separate commits to remove the
  previous tag and re-create a tag based on trunk. Basically revert what
  Dan did in 8384ad849dfe308ed3e63e252785b9a6f80474f5 [4].

* Use versioned tags. Branch support in subversion sucks.

* Switch to something saner than subversion.

* Accept the fact that fast-forwarding branches in subversion is slow
  and so is archrelease.

Any opinions/other suggestions?

[1] http://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2005-03/0458.shtml
[2] http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn.branchmerge.tags.html#svn.branchmerge.tags.mkcomplex
[3] http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn.branchmerge.tags.html#svn.branchmerge.tags.mksimple
[4] http://projects.archlinux.org/devtools.git/commit/?id=8384ad84