[wp-hackers] Plugin repository issue

[Otto]

On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 8:50 AM, Rich Pedley <elfin at elfden.co.uk> wrote:
> On 28/08/2010 14:45, Austin Matzko wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 8:30 AM, Otto<otto at ottodestruct.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> You should probably go through and remove a lot of those older
>>> versions. With the way the current system works, having lots of older
>>> versions lying around is not a great idea, as it makes it take an
>>> extremely long time to do updates.
>>
>> Could you elaborate on this?  Are you saying there should be a limited
>> number of subdirectories under "tags"?
>
> Additionally if there is any issues with excessive tagged version, how many
> can safely be left before plugin authors should think about deleting some.
>
> Though from my limited understanding of Subversion, it isn't a problem
> there, more with the public listing of these?

Sure.

Basically the process that updates the plugin page on wp.org goes
through all the versions in the tags directory. So if there's a lot,
it takes longer. Linear-time O(n) algorithm.

There's no SVN problem with keeping as many versions as you want, but
it gets slower when the number gets large because there's more to
parse and do and such. Eventually I suppose it might hit some
processing limit, but I've not seen any such thing with 30+ versions.

But there's no actual limit, and the process will get around to it
eventually, but less is better. And honestly, having old versions with
extremely minor changes lying around is rather pointless. Generally I
try to keep old versions there only when they had significant changes
(although I'm pretty bad about cleaning them up myself).

Also consider it from a user experience. You want the last few
versions there in case somebody needs to rollback their site or
something, but having a list of every version yea until the beginning
of all time is kinda silly.

-Otto