Re: mirror date report
Dirk.Eddelbuettel@qed.econ.queensu.ca wrote on 25.12.96 in <[🔎] m0vcwgr-000F0PC@bird.sps.queensu.ca>:
> Very good idea. Could we also recommend (as we cannot enforce it) that
> mirrors use
>
> use_timelocal=false
>
> (and not the default value of true). This way, files on different mirrors
> will have the same time-stamp. This should make comparisons easier, and will
> make switching mirrors _a lot_ easier.
This is README-URGENT from the mirror upstream source (at least back when
I built my own, before I switched to Debian):
--- snip ---
With previous versions of mirror when it timestamped the local file
with the time of the remote file it converted it to GMT. This meant
that when you did an 'ls -l' on the file it would be a different time
to that on the originating site.
This version of mirror corrects that. BUT it means that all your
existing timestamps are invalid. To correct this for each package
you need to do:
mirror -kuse_timelocal=0 package
to make sure the package is up to date
mirror -T package
to force correction of all timestamps
If you fail to do this mirror is likely to decide that all your files are
out of date and re-pull the lot!
If, like me, your site has a 0 offset from GMT then you don't have to do
anything.
--- snap ---
Are you sure you got the polarity right? (There is a serious problem if
the ftp daemon and mirror disagree about the time zone, of course, but
when I test-mirror myself with timelocal=true, all the timestamps are OK!)
Probably some ftp server's ftp daemon doesn't get timezone info, while
cron (which starts mirror) does, and vice versa. I'm not quite sure what
we can do about that, except tell people to check for this.
It might also help to have a file on master that contains a list of all
the files we want mirrors to have, and then ask all mirrors to use this
file instead of doing the ls themselves (ls_lR_file=/debian/some_file).
The current ls-lR leaves out all the dot files, including stuff like
.message - is this really what we want?
The following might be an alternative way to generate a listing that
mirror can use:
find . \! -name "*.new*" -print0 | xargs -0 ls -ld >some_file
(add whatever other files aren't useful).
It might also be good to teach mirror sites about archive maintenance
(what time of day to avoid for mirroring) - not even ftp.debian.org seems
immune from this problem ...
In general, how about about a README.how-to-mirror where all stuff like
this could go?
MfG Kai
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