[core-workflow] Fate of SVN externals

[Zachary Ware]

On Wed, Dec 7, 2016 at 2:39 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> Windows builds rely on hand-maintained copies (sometimes patched) of
> external libraries.  Those copies are currently maintained in SVN
> (yes, you read this correctly).  The URL is
> http://svn.python.org/projects/external/
>
> Not only does this mandate an additional dependency to run a Windows
> build (I don't think we use SVN anywhere else), but it actually makes
> them unpleasantly slower, because SVN is crappy at making checkouts.
>
> Is it planned to move that repo to git?

I would very much like to move away from hosting these things on
svn.p.o, but haven't yet had time to figure out the best way to do so,
let alone get it done.  I've considered doing shallow checkouts of a
Git repository set up very much like svn.p.o/projects/external, doing
some manner of black magic with Git submodules, or just downloading
source tarballs and maintaining any necessary patches in the cpython
repo.  The biggest issue with the third option currently is that
Windows doesn't have a `patch` command, but it looks like `git apply`
will happily apply patches to files it doesn't track, so I'm starting
to really like that option.  Steve has expressed apprehension about
depending on external infrastructure to be able to build installers,
so we'd probably need to rehost the tarballs somewhere rather than
downloading from their distributors.

-- 
Zach