[gentoo-dev] mirroring distfiles/patches on patches.gentoo.org

[Stefan Schweizer]

To my fellow Gentoo Devlopers and Users,

The Gentoo Infrastructure team proposed this idea in june 2006
 * Reduce mirror time for Gentoo specific patches/tarballs
 * Offer an official location for Gentoo specific patches/tarballs
   (Instead of using dev.g.o, this would be the official place)
 * Offer a distributed (3+ servers) mirror rotation for this

This would be the "official" location for those distfiles when infra makes
it available. I am asking them for status reports on this you will maybe
see some here :)

But for the meantime I am using http://gentooexperimental.org/~genstef/dist
for this purpose. The reason is that I can remove and add stuff there
myself and can keep control of what gets deleted. I can use my favourite
scripts to create distfiles and keep them ordered. For example I am using
this for firefox-2.0. This workaround I initially had to use when I
discovered a bug in the mirroring script that was annoying me regularly.
The mirroring script does ignore all RESTRICT=mirror SRC_URIs even those at
mirror://gentoo/.
"Bug 121332 ppp patch missing from distfiles"
"Bug 100260 The File foo2zjs-20050319.tar.gz missed on Gentoo-Mirrors"
Those get uploaded and look fine but after 6 months they are suddenly being
removed by the script.

Initially of course I needed a solution of that bug badly and because the
mirrors kept dropping it I have just uploaded it to dev.gentoo.org in lack
of any other proper place to put it. But using dev.gentoo.org is deprecated
by our infra because the server may not be able to cope with the traffic.
Fortunately later I was able to get an account on Patrick Lauers
development server http://gentooexperimental.org/~genstef/dist to upload my
distfiles there.

So this is my current practice and I am eagerly waiting for infra to allow
me to use an "official" service instead of my bandaid. Unfortunately some
people are really afraid of what I am doing and want to harass me into
using the mirror://gentoo that I do not want to use. This mail is dedicated
to explain the issue to those people. 

Please, dont argue such discussions that only give you personal satisfaction
of being correct or an excuse to annoy other people. Useless yelling at
each other because of a minority where opinions differ is misplaced in a
project that is driven by volunteers. That is also why I have stopped and
written this mail.

But I can see that you are a bit frustrated because you did not get your way
through. So here is a guide of what you can do. I will gladly stop using
workarounds when I am allowed to have an equally bugfree and fast workflow
as currently. What you can do:

1) write a patch for portage to allow granular mirror restrictions for the
SRC_URI and work with infra on improving the mirroring script to not ignore
mirror://gentoo in mirror-restricted ebuilds. Also for this solution the
time for a distfile in /space/distfiles-local to hit the first mirror
should be equal to the time for ebuilds to get into the rsync rotation so
that problems for users who are too early.

2) get infra to provide patches.gentoo.org as a permanent solution that I
have asked for since march 2005 and it sometimes even looked close to
getting it on bug 85098.

Thanks for understanding
Stefan Schweizer

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