Re: sunsite.org.uk - rsync access to cd-images

[Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>]

> > You need enough room spare to have two copies of the largest file you're 
> > rsyncing.
>  
> Wouldn't be easier to build an image with YACS and then rsync that?  Or
> have I missed something?

I think that's effectively what we're talking about.

  1) create some sort of image that's close enough

  2) rsync the official one on top

It seems that step 1) could probably be achieved by cat-ing the package files 
together (with a bit of padding), which would probably be fairly quick, and 
doesn't require anything more than the list of packages.

We should be able to do this in a simple script, in which case we can have 
people do it without having them have to install anything more than rsync 
itself.  That way people that don't actually run Linux might have some chance 
of doing it, and we could request that our mirrors use it as a mirroring 
method, especially since all the CD image mirrors generally mirror the full 
archive too.

Hm,  I wonder how much effort it would be to patch rsync to take a list of 
extra files from which to try and find the download data.  That way, we could 
just point rsync at the .deb's in the ftp archive, and it could pick out the 
data it needed, without the image build step.

Cheers, Phil.