On Fri, 11 Nov 2011, Andreas Gustafsson wrote:
If only there was a way to mirror the repository that would guarantee a consistent snapshot...
You can't really, but you could check whether there were any changes very close to the time when you made the snapshot, and assume that such changes may be incomplete. You could also assume that changes that have not yet appeared in the source-changes mailing list may be incomplete.
When you suspect you may have incomplete changes, I can think of two reasonably simple strategies to deal with that:
1. Don't perform the build now. Instead, make another snapshot, and loop until you get a snapshot without any changes that are so recent that there's a risk that they might be incomplete.
2. Backtrack through the list of changes until you find a quiet period that lasts long enough for comfort. Use a "-D" argument that specifies a time within the quiet period.
I seldom see more than a 1 second gap in the commit times for files that belong to the same logical commit, so looking for a 5 second quiet period would probably be enough.
--apb (Alan Barrett)