Do we need generate.pl to wipe/recreate the download dir every time?

[waterkip]

I'm regenerating the Dockerfiles and I noticed it takes ages. 10 years ago it was added via 5150798. I'm not 100% if we still need this tear-down, tear-up strategy.

Perhaps we can add some kind of flag to generate.pl to keep the old behaviour, but this would speed up regenerations.

  {
    my $dir = "$downloads/perl-$release->{version}";
    qx{rm -fR $dir};
    mkdir $dir or die "Couldn't create $dir";
    qx{
      tar -C "$downloads" -xf $dir.tar.gz &&\
      cd $dir &&\
      chown -R \$(id -u):\$(id -g) . &&\
      git init &&\
      git add . &&\
      git commit -m tmp
    };
    die "Couldn't create a temp git repo for $release->{version}" if $? != 0;
    Devel::PatchPerl->patch_source($release->{version}, $dir);
    $patch = qx{
      cd $dir && git -c 'diff.mnemonicprefix=false' diff
    };
    die "Couldn't create a Devel::PatchPerl patch for $release->{version}" if $? != 0;
  }

I often see cat *.patch errors in the logs when an image is build, so the slowdown seems not justifiable.

[zakame]

HI @waterkip , thanks for the report!

It doesn't take ages for me to regenerate here, nor for the clean-room GHA job that runs these for every PR/merge - the only time it would slow down is usually at the download of the source tarballs, not on the git diff/patch job. The recent job only took 18s even https://github.com/Perl/docker-perl/actions/runs/17185402252/job/48753690054

That said, I'm happy to have a PR to toggle Devel::PatchPerl patching as we haven't really created any patch files for the currently-supported releases. FWIW Devel::PatchPerl hasn't seen an update since 2021 and all current Perls are way past that vintage, so unless @bingos makes a new release (I spy a trial some weeks ago) it could also be worth toggling out by default.

[waterkip]

For me the untar is really slow, so I was thinking to have the hit only once. And unpack and add develpatch with ./generate.pl --devel-patch.

Argh, I know why, I suddenly realized, its on my NAS! So everything is downloaded and done on my NAS and that doesn't have nvme disks (it has, but not for that).