Re: [gentoo-dev] Change layout of distfiles

[Marius Mauch]

On Mon, 6 Mar 2006 16:02:06 +0000
Kurt Lieber <klieber@g.o> wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 07:59:14AM -0500 or thereabouts, Alec Warner
> wrote:
> > I believe the Infrastructure team also doesn't want to change the
> > layout, but I'll leave it up to them to comment on their own
> > policy ;)
>
> We'd love to change the layout to something similar to what Michael
> proposed.  It's the actual changeover process that scares the bejesus
> out of us.  Many of our mirrors have diligent, professional admins
> who will work with us to make the change.  Some of our other mirrors
> don't.  It's easy to say, "well, screw those others, then" except
> when you consider that our users will be the ones to feel the pain if
> a mirror doesn't pick up on the change (or support the necessary
> sym/hard linking mojo to make it work)
>
> If we can come up with a seamless, painless transition process, great,
> let's make it happen.

As long as the mirrors provide the files at the current address (via
hardlinks, redirects or rewrite magic doesn't matter) I don't see an
issue from the portage side, of course if the mirror script uses
portage we have to take a look at that. But such a change would be an
internal infra thing more or less.
I'm very opposed however to any client side changes, not only for
transitioning issues but also as this would require special casing code
for gentoo mirrors, both in mirror:// and GENTOO_MIRRORS handling, and
as TGL has mentioned there are some cases where we can't be sure if we
have a mirror with this new or a "traditional" structure. If at all
this would need a generic solution, something that's probably a bit too
complex for a (minor?) performance issue.

Marius

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