Hi,

In the MeeGo TV project we are using OBS to deliver the open source code to our users. They then integrate that open source code with their proprietary code (often drivers and applications)

In order to enable them to collect a known working release of a set of packages we need to create a snap shot.

Creating a snap shot by a branch is long and tedious and so we have created the concept of Tag (like in svn). The Tag is a a list of packages with MD5 from a project. That tag can be used to automatically copy the associated packages from the public OBS to a private OBS instance.

An obs2obscopy tool only copy the packages which are not already present and at the correct revision on the target.

The main issue comes from the fact that we create the Tag with a set of osc log command which takes time (about 10mn for MeeGo oss 1.2 which has about 1300 packages) and the risk of someone changing a package during that time is not negligible.

For info the source of the obstag and obs2obscopy tools are attached with this bug and the latest version can be found here :

http://wiki.meego.com/File:ObsTagCopy.tgz

Proposition
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Tag Creation
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What would be very useful would be for OBS to directly allow the creation of such a Tag via an API command. As the information is already present in the DB it would be quick and the risk of change happening during the tag creation could be eliminated.
It would also reduce the load of the OBS server compared to the current method which run more than a thousand osc log requests to create a Tag.

Copy from Tag
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What would be then nice to have, would be the integration of the obs2obscopy to the API as it would reduce the load on OBS and simplify the use of the Tag to users.
That second requirement is more a nice to have as the current tool does its job.

-- 
Dominig ar Foll
MeeGo TV
Intel Open Source Technology Centre.