Re: [gentoo-dev] Reducing the size of distfiles for our mirrors

[Stuart Herbert]

On Tuesday 22 July 2003 2:24 pm, Rainer Groesslinger wrote:
> Perhaps you already thought about this but IMHO part of that policy should
> be that files which are stored on a network with a good mirroring
> infrastructure (sourceforge, kernel.org etc.) are never placed on our
> distfiles because it is very unlikely all 10 mirrors (or how many
> sourceforge ever has) are down and since the gentoo distfile mirrors are
> used before the
> mirror://sourceforge in the ebuild it causes more traffic to the mirrors
> (plus the space it takes) because nobody really gets it from sourceforge...
>
> I think we could save a lot of bandwidth _and_ space if such files aren't
> placed on the gentoo mirrors if not absolutly neccessary, I don't see a
> real reason why we need to put hundreds of files on the gentoo mirrors
> which are already stored on a very good mirroring system.

I've just thought of a problem with this.  Not necessarily about Sourceforge 
(although it needs to be thought about) but one in general.

If the source code's in our distfiles mirror system, we're immune from any 
changes / withdrawals made elsewhere.  Our ebuilds will continue to work 
until the package itself breaks, or we choose to replace it.

But if we're not mirroring the source code, then the ebuild breaks as soon as 
the source code tarball/rpm/whatever is withdrawn from the author's master 
site.  It shouldn't be a big problem, but it's worth thinking about.

(Just to clarify - I believe we shouldn't be mirroring commercial packages 
without very good reason ;-)

Best regards,
Stu
-- 
Stuart Herbert                                              stuart@g.o
Gentoo Developer                                       http://www.gentoo.org/
Upcoming packages list                http://dev.gentoo.org/~stuart/packages/

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