Re: [Pgbuildfarm-members] [HACKERS] Reducing buildfarm disk usage: remove temp installs when done

On 01/19/2015 09:53 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> writes:
>> But I'm wondering if we should look at using the tricks git-new-workdir
>> uses, setting up symlinks instead of a full clone. Then we'd have one
>> clone with a bunch of different work dirs. That plus a but of explicitly
>> done garbage collection and possibly a periodic re-clone might do the trick.
> Yeah, I was wondering whether it'd be okay to depend on git-new-workdir.
> That would fix the problem pretty nicely. But in the installations I've
> seen, that's not in PATH but squirreled away in some hard-to-guess library
> directory ...
>
>

Following some discussion on -hackers, here's a trial patch that reduces
the amount of space taken by symlinking the git repos on all non-HEAD
branches to the HEAD branch repo.

There are more steps we can possibly take to reduce space consumption,
but this is a start. If anyone is feeling brave they can apply this and
see how it goes.

For now at least, it doesn't work on Windows, nor on machines using the
git_reference config setting.

cheers

amdrew