Tags and named transactions : clarification is needed

[paul.zakharov]

I’d like to have some advice about small problem.

We have two publishers connected with gateway installed on Stratum0.

Transactions on our system is triggered by some CI system. So in general it’s something that we don’t control manually.

Recently we add the tag option “-a” to our publish command.
But the main (and almost the only one) reason for that was to be able to detect which process/commit trigger the CI (and so trigger the publish).

Finally we are re-reading docs and found that tag system is not done for these purposes.
It seems that the purpose of tags in CVMFS is similar to github/gitlab “tag” : it creates some point in time where we could come back if necessary.

So from here I have some questions :

1. Is this correct ?
   And if it’s the case, we probably should remove our “-a” option as we have already a lot of “tags”.
   Am I right ?

2. Are there some options for giving a name (or comments) to transaction but without using tag ?
   From docs it seems that no, but I prefer to ask. I’d like to know if I could submit a feature request to have such option ?

3. It seems that tagged transactions are not affected by garbage collector.
   If so, it means that we have to remove all tags that we created actually.
   I have some questions about it.
   Is there some way to force gc to clean tagged transactions ?
   If not, “tag -r” do “remove tag ”.
   Do it remove only tag, not the transaction itself ? Which name transaction will have ?
   Do I need open transaction and the do publish to remove a tag ?

Thank you very much for helping.

[dwd]

I believe you are correct. I can answer mostly #3, in that I know that tags do prevent gc from cleaning out the version of code referred to it. Removing a tag doesn’t remove any data, it just makes it available to be garbage collected if nothing is referring to it anymore (for example if files were later rm’ed). I don’t believe that cvmfs_server tag -r requires a transaction.