Here’s an OSTD feature I was really excited about and looking forward to implement: allow the user to put in some version control info for a project so that I can run a nightly cron job and pull any new translations that have been added to that project. Would have been a great feature, and it would have provided a self-improvement mechanism for the OSTD.

And then I went and read about the capabilities of Git and Mercurial. Did you know that unlike that archaic version control system SVN the new and fancy distributed version control systems do not allow partial clones of repositories?

In other words, I cannot pull from a public repository only the po folder with the po files. I have to clone the entire repository. There’s an option to only pull the latest revision, but even that can be huge.

I cannot possibly afford the disk space, bandwidth, or time necessary to clone and do updates on thousands of full repositories which I was hoping to have linked into the OSTD. It would have worked perfectly with SVN, but not with the new systems.

So now what? My feature has been erased from the design board by the growing popularity of Git. I’m going to have to find a different solution, perhaps I can arrange something with Debian who have some kind of mechanism for indexing po files inside their packages.

Git.