Mark Millard
2021-Apr-23 23:48 UTC
https://artifact.ci.freebsd.org/snapshot/stable-13/?C=M&O=D messed up dates and HASHID-only use make things extremely hard to find "in time order"
Using an example to illustrate problems finding artifacts, the problems not being limited to the example's specifics. I have historically used https://artifact.ci.freebsd.org/snapshot/ to do build-less approximate bisecting (and other things). Such use is very messed up since the git-related URL conventions chosen were put in place. The below illustrates an example of the mess for how things are currently presented. https://artifact.ci.freebsd.org/snapshot/stable-13/?C=M&O=D lists ac845558f7b626d9a31b8f6dab686c45d39dc5a0/ as having date/time 2021-Apr-10 18:43 . But: https://artifact.ci.freebsd.org/snapshot/stable-13/ac845558f7b626d9a31b8f6dab686c45d39dc5a0/?C=M&O=D lists: powerpc/ and arm/ as having date/times 2021-Apr-10 18:54 and 2021-Apr-10 18:50 yet lists... i386/ and arm64/ as having date/times 2021-Feb-19 19:00 and 2021-Feb-19 18:50 . But it gets worse: https://artifact.ci.freebsd.org/snapshot/stable-13/ac845558f7b626d9a31b8f6dab686c45d39dc5a0/powerpc/?C=M&O=D shows an empty directory. Same for: https://artifact.ci.freebsd.org/snapshot/stable-13/ac845558f7b626d9a31b8f6dab686c45d39dc5a0/arm/?C=M&O=D By contrast, https://artifact.ci.freebsd.org/snapshot/stable-13/ac845558f7b626d9a31b8f6dab686c45d39dc5a0/i386/?C=M&O=D shows i386/ with date/time 2021-Apr-10 18:43 but https://artifact.ci.freebsd.org/snapshot/stable-13/ac845558f7b626d9a31b8f6dab686c45d39dc5a0/i386/i386/?C=M&O=D shows all the file dates as 2021-Feb-19 19:00 . Going back to arm64/ I find a similar 2021-Feb-19 dating, although 21021-Feb does show up in more places: https://artifact.ci.freebsd.org/snapshot/stable-13/ac845558f7b626d9a31b8f6dab686c45d39dc5a0/arm64/?C=M&O=D shows aarch64/ with date/time 2021-Feb-19 18:50 and https://artifact.ci.freebsd.org/snapshot/stable-13/ac845558f7b626d9a31b8f6dab686c45d39dc5a0/arm64/aarch64/?C=M&O=D shows the files also having the date/time 2021-Feb-19 18:50 . In my view the choice to only use the hash-id for the commit in the url is a usability mistake and the url prefix should be of a form more like (for this example context): https://artifact.ci.freebsd.org/snapshot/stable-13/n??????-HASHID/ where the ?????? is from: git rev-list --first-parent --count (as used elsewhere by FreeBSD). (The HASHID might be just the 12 character prefix instead of the whole hash-id as well.) Such a convention would be more independent of dates possibly being touched on the file server and would make time ordered finding of things (such as for build-less approximate bisecting) far more reasonable. ==Mark Millard marklmi at yahoo.com ( dsl-only.net went away in early 2018-Mar)