Use full repo when building windows installer

[pramodk]

• by default depth is 1 and hence only HEAD is checked out
• this gives version below i.e. tag is missing
  NEURON -- VERSION + HEAD (0e9a051+) 2021-04-30

[pramodk]

Seems like Azure pipelines don't do shallow clone by default but GitHub Actions do:

[codecov-commenter]

Codecov Report

Merging #1232 (8dcc8ee) into master (b159f76) will increase coverage by 0.08%.
The diff coverage is n/a.

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##           master    #1232      +/-   ##
==========================================
+ Coverage   31.87%   31.95%   +0.08%     
==========================================
  Files         572      572              
  Lines      108988   108988              
==========================================
+ Hits        34739    34829      +90     
+ Misses      74249    74159      -90     

Impacted Files	Coverage Δ
src/parallel/bbs.cpp	64.78% <0.00%> (+1.87%)	⬆️
src/parallel/bbssrv2mpi.cpp	56.89% <0.00%> (+5.74%)	⬆️
src/nrnmpi/bbsmpipack.cpp	86.44% <0.00%> (+12.42%)	⬆️
src/parallel/bbsclimpi.cpp	50.00% <0.00%> (+20.12%)	⬆️
src/parallel/bbssrvmpi.cpp	43.03% <0.00%> (+29.11%)	⬆️

---

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[nrnhines]

Isn't this a sledgehammer for a gnat? What depth would be sufficient to get a good NEURON version?

[pramodk]

I think there is no easy way - we need to know the last tag for git describe and that can't be fixed? this is default behaviour on Azure CI but not on GitHub Actions.

[alkino]

maybe use --single-branch

On my computer:
full: 12min 03sec
depth 500: 18sec
single-branch: 43sec

@pramodk @nrnhines ?

[nrnhines]

--single-branch is definitely a solution to to the git describe problem. And for me it is an order of magnitude faster as well.

hines@Michaels-MacBook-Pro-2 neuron % time git clone http://github.com/neuronsimulator/nrn --branch netcvode-cover --single-branch temp
Cloning into 'temp'...
warning: redirecting to https://github.com/neuronsimulator/nrn/
remote: Enumerating objects: 27039, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (21/21), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (12/12), done.
remote: Total 27039 (delta 9), reused 20 (delta 9), pack-reused 27018
Receiving objects: 100% (27039/27039), 36.82 MiB | 3.97 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (18782/18782), done.
git clone http://github.com/neuronsimulator/nrn --branch netcvode-cover  temp  2.82s user 1.01s system 37% cpu 10.121 total
hines@Michaels-MacBook-Pro-2 neuron % (cd temp ; git describe)
8.0a-488-gc7b37ec2
hines@Michaels-MacBook-Pro-2 neuron % (cd temp ; git status)
On branch netcvode-cover
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/netcvode-cover'.

nothing to commit, working tree clean

[nrnhines]

full: 12min 03sec

The --single-branch solution for CI seems to me to be a good one but is not so great for development involving pull and push. For my local environment which often does not have high bandwidth to GitHub, I've gotten into the habit of
having a local mirror clone, nrngit, which I use only with a newpr.sh script with the substantive contents:

cd $HOME/neuron/nrngit
git pull
git-checkout-all-remote

cd $HOME/neuron
git clone nrngit $1
cd $HOME/neuron/$1
git remote set-url origin [email protected]:neuronsimulator/nrn
git pull

The git-checkout-all-remote script is

#!/bin/sh
git remote prune origin
git branch | grep -v "master" | xargs git branch -D 
git pull --all
git branch -r | grep -v '\->' | while read remote; do git branch --track "${remote#origin/}" "$remote"; done

So now the time it takes work on a fresh clone from GitHub is not onerous, e.g.

time newpr.sh temp
...
0.99s user 0.58s system 39% cpu 3.941 total

The flaw, of course, is that subprocess cloneing time is not reduced when I need CoreNEURON, NMODL, etc.

[alkino]

My solution is only for CI, nothing more.

On local if you remove all branches it will be hard to work.

Locally you can clone it once, and update the repository each day?

[alexsavulescu]

Unfortunately this feature has to be supported by GHA/Azure, or at least have some simple script on top of their checkout mechanisms. Otherwise there are several events to take into account (PRs, merge, release branches, manual dispatch, ...) and that would take dedicated time to cover & properly test & more maintenance .

I can maybe propose a compromise: depth=1 whenever we have PRs/merges and depth=0 when we do deliveries(here it's more about the Windows installer and wheels). The downside would be that for depth=1 artifacts we may not know exactly where they originated from, i.e. 5e68f3e