At Akademy we can up with the idea of making dev/unstable better to use for developers. Right now if a dev would quickly need to test something in kio they still need to clone kio and build it from scratch.
Enter sideloading.
While cmake is not relocatable, our workspaces have a static somewhat neat path /workspace/$foo-$version/ on the server. We could put the workspace in a tarball and publish it into an s3 or similar system, then have a client side script which downloads the workspace tarballs and unpacks it for use.
Server
- tarball workspace
- xz it
- source package probably doesn't need any additional work since we publish that via apt archive anyway
- archive workspace tarball somewhere with good storage capacity (s3?)
- garbage collect regularly
Client
- script to prepare a build env
- needs to make sure system is up-to-date
- build-dep $foo
- fetch workspace tarball
- unpack
- chdir into it, possibly print message about used cmake flag and where the build dir
- resides
Open Questions
- our sources aren't full clones, how could we merge our existing artifacts into a full repo without having to have our source become super huge by preserving .git?
- zsync or similar binary diff download?