Re: GNOME FTP Restructure Issues

[Tomas Ogren <stric ing umu se>]

On 08 August, 2002 - Jeff Waugh sent me these 4,3K bytes:

> Hi all,

HELO

>   - Continue archiving source as we've done:
> 
>     This is very useful, and works well, but we must also allow mirror
>     operators to exclude old versions even if we want to keep them.
>     Hopefully ftp.gnome.org in Sweden will continue to host these anyway.

We have no plans AFAIK to do selective mirroring. The Gnome archive is
pretty small compared to for instance 7-8 isos for 11+1 archs (our
debian mirror).. ;)

>   - Work out what to do with distribution packages:
> 
>     We're either crap at this, or it doesn't matter. Is it really important
>     to have distribution packages on GNOME FTP? They're seldom updated, and
>     the distros are better at handling updates, etc., than we are, so is it
>     relevant anymore?

There's no reason to have binary packages for dists that already have
their own packages at least...

> Some of the ideas that various people on the release team have come up with
> in the past are listed below. Please read these, but remember that the
> important bit is solving the above problems.
> 
>   - A small concept in a larger solution: Having a single sources directory
>     for the tarball archive, and symlink basically everything else to it.
> 
>     Disadvantages: Hard for mirror operators to selectively exclude the bulk
>     of the data (tarballs) for old versions, hard to keep module directories
>     sane because every version *ever* would be kept in their dirs. One
>     solution to that was to put them in subdirs named <major>-<minor> (based
>     on the module's version not the release's), although that seems quite
>     messy.

I suppose mirrors that only want to get the "latest and greatest" for
instance could do a mirror of the "latest"-directory which is populated
by symlinks.. and do symlink dereferencing mirror...

/Tomas
-- 
Tomas Ögren, stric ing umu se, http://www.ing.umu.se/~stric/
|- Student at Computing Science, University of Umeå
`- Sysadmin at {cs,ing,acc}.umu.se