Re: How will Debian someday remove ports of obsolete hardware?
Sam Vilain <sam@vilain.net> writes:
> Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> wrote:
> > > How many lunatics would you require for a port to be active?
> > Who knows. But it's certainly ridiculous hyperbole to say that
> > we'll maintain a port for only one person.
We could introduce a metric how many lunatics are out there. My idea
for finding out how many lunatics are out there is just by counting
the downloads of the relevant files. If we now drop only architectures
with a download count of zero for more than two consecutive releases,
we should be pretty safe, with respect to the arch still being
used... ;-)
> I think the underlying problem here is viewing the debian mirror
> network as identical mirror copies of a huge directory tree. All
> that is important for most of the mirrors is that they can cache the
> most frequently used packages in the repository, and periodic
> updates merely update the list of packages available, and perhaps
> pre-cache the most frequently requested or important packages.
>
> An easy way to do this might be to make the mirror live under a CGI
> script;
>
> deb http://mirror/debmirror.cgi stable main
>
> And the debmirror.cgi script can then emulate a full archive,
> pulling unseen packages from upstream mirrors as necessary and
> updating its internal partial mirror itself (ideally in such a way
> that direct access to that partial mirror, without going through the
> CGI script gives you access to the partial packages).
Great idea, IMHO. The script could also be modified to keep statistics
how often the file was requested and/or forward them to the upstream
mirror. That way, we would get some quite accurate data, on which we
could base the decision to keep or to drop an architecture.
> This way, someone could dedicate less than the total size of the
> archive to the mirror, and still expect to help decrease the load on
> the existing mirror servers.
You mean, like a dedicated squid proxy network, just server-side? ;-)
Cheers, Ulli
--
Ullrich Jans Eichenstrasse 4
Tel: +49 89 74427834 82024 Taufkirchen
Usenet: ujans@ullisys.pond.sub.org RealUlli@IRC
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