revision control downloads

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 23, 2022, at 16:31, Rainer Müller wrote:
> On 22/03/2022 22.23, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
>> As I said we do already and have for a long time strongly discouraged using revision control systems for downloads.
> 
> As these days most web frontends allow to download a tarball, we could
> also think about discouraging fetching from VCS completely.

Obviously wherever that option exists we should be using it already. The github portgroup for example makes that easy to do for projects hosted at GitHub.

There are many ports that fetch from git because they need git submodules (as you mentioned), which those automatically-generated tarballs do not include. Ideally the developers of those projects would provide release downloads; if they do, we should obviously be using those (e.g. with the github portgroup's "github.tarball_from releases").

Some projects have complicated build processes which include fetching from git somewhere in them. Aseprite is an example of that.

Some git hosting providers seem to be unable to provide reproducible tarball download capability, despite the fact that GitHub and others have been able to. GoogleSource.com is an example. See https://github.com/google/gitiles/issues/84