Re: Interesting post-mortem on a near disaster with git

On 03/24/2013 06:06 PM, Michael Paquier wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 12:52 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us 
> <mailto:tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>> wrote:
>
>     Over the weekend, KDE came within a gnat's eyelash of losing *all*
>     their authoritative git repos, despite having seemingly-extensive
>     redundancy.  Read about it here:
>     http://jefferai.org/2013/03/24/too-perfect-a-mirror/
>
> It is really great that KDE people are actually sharing this 
> experience. This is really profitable for other projects as well as 
> individuals.
> And thanks for sharing it here.
>
>
>     We should think about protecting our own repo a bit better, especially
>     after the recent unpleasantness with a bogus forced update.  The idea
>     of having clones that are deliberately a day or two behind seems
>     attractive ...
>
> Just an idea here: why not adding a new subdomain in postgresql.org 
> <http://postgresql.org> for mirrors of the official GIT repository
> similar to the buildfarm?
> People registered in this service could publish themselves mirrors and 
> decide by themselves the delay their
> clone keeps with the parent repo. The scripts used by each mirror 
> maintainer (for backup, sync repo with
> a given delay) could be centralized in a way similar to buildfarm code 
> so as everybody in the community could
> use it and publish it if they want.
>
> Also, the mirrors published should be maintained by people that are 
> well-known inside the community,
> and who would not add extra commits which would make the mirror 
> out-of-sync with the parent repo.
>
> Such an idea is perhaps too much if the point is to maintain 2-3 
> mirrors of the parent repo, but gives
> enough transparency to actually know where the mirrors are and what is 
> the sync delay maintained.



This strikes me as being overkill. The sysadmins seem to have it covered.

Back when we used CVS for quite a few years I kept 7 day rolling 
snapshots of the CVS repo, against just such a difficulty as this. But 
we seem to be much better organized with infrastructure these days so I 
haven't done that for a long time.

cheers

andrew