Unable to ftpsync-cron from free.hands.com

[David Croft <david@sargasso.net>]

We are no longer able to sync from free.hands.com (ftp.uk.debian.org)
since 25 January

ftpsync-cron does a curl of
http://free.hands.com/debian/project/trace/free.hands.com to check the
current version. This worked fine for a long time.

Now free.hands.com links to ftp.uk.debian.org instead and is no longer
accessible on that URL. That would be okay, except that if I change my
RSYNC_HOST to be ftp.uk.debian.org instead, now ftpsync-cron looks for
http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/project/trace/ftp.uk.debian.org, which
of course does not exist because the machine still considers itself to
be free.hands.com

Can this please be fixed (and changes like this announced in advance in future)?

Either the machine needs to consider itself to be ftp.uk.debian.org in
the trace directory, or the http://free.hands.com URLs still need to
work.

Alternatively ftpsync-cron needs to be amended to allow the RSYNC_HOST
to be different from the "what the host considers itself to be in the
trace directory", although I don't consider this an elegant solution
as then people will need to have to make further guesses as to what
the different hostnames should be and this is brittle against future
upstream changes.

Or best of all maybe we can finally be allowed to sync from a
syncproxy host so we can have a reliable upstream and not have to
repeatedly disappoint users with mystery issues like this stopping
updates every couple of years until somebody notices and guesses what
the latest upstream should be.

Regards,

David

-- 
David Croft