[gentoo-dev] Proposal: re-organizing our source mirrors into two categories: full and partial

[Kurt Lieber]

Folks --

I'd like to propose the following reorg for our mirrors.  Right now, all
mirrors are required to carry all directories.  I'd like to break that into
two categories: full mirrors and distfile mirrors.

Full mirrors would still be required to carry all directories.  Full means
full, after all. :)

distfile mirrors would be required to carry two directories: /distfiles and
/snapshots.  /snapshots contains snapshots of the portage tree and is used
by emerge-webrsync for folks that are behind restrictive firewalls.
Typically, the /snapshot directory is under 250MB.

This gives mirrors who are short on disk space an option to still support
Gentoo without having to set aside nearly 50GB of space for us.  For
mirrors who do have enough disk space, they can continue to mirror the full
tree.  

We will of course continue to work at reducing the overall amount of data
that we have.  However, over time, our space requirements will undoubtedly
continue to increase.  This proposal is meant as a longer term solution to
give mirror admins an option on how best they can support Gentoo in their
environment.

Also, for the many people who suggested a p2p network as an option, that is
certainly something we will consider in the future.  That will take
planning and coordination, however, as it will likely require changes to
portage.  In the mean time, our system of FTP and HTTP mirrors will
continue to be our primary method of distribution and we still needed a
solution to address these mirrors.

Your comments and ideas are welcome.