Re: Proposal

[Ben Collins <bmc@visi.net>]

On Tue, Nov 17, 1998 at 12:32:25AM +0100, Davide G. M. Salvetti wrote:
> Shortly, I propose to create special trees for special countries (like
> US, FR, and the like), which are likely to be few, filled with
> symlinks to only those packages of the full Debian allowed in those
> country.
> 

This sounds like a good idea, but one that will probably be as a result of
other policies becoming reality.

>From what I have seen thus far it seems that there is a general agreement
that restricted packages need to have a special control file tag which
contains basically the type of restriction and where it may be applicable
Please see my entire proposal, the idea was helped by some one i can't
remember right off hand, and also I believe Johnny Ingrams post was
relatively similar.

I am pretty certain that if we get this agreed on we can move forward in
designing/modifying distribution systems around it (keeping in mind the
ideas we have already seen, ie. usenet system, special mirrors, or basic
restricted directories such as my proposal covers). After which we can
consult with the package system developers as to the feasibility of these
things (which i'm sure they will have the knowledge to implement :).

As a side note I'd like to throw another idea out as far as making sure
mirrors only get the packages they are legally able to distribute. This
may or may not be feasible, but probably possible. It would be based on
the control information. A modified ftpd which would load the current
restricted package info (only relevant info, to keep memory low). All
mirrors who use this specialized server (and it would be for mirrors only)
would have their mirror host registered basically saying which country
they were located in. Upon connecting and downloading the distribution the
server would track the restricted packages making sure the server never
sees packages which it cannot distribute. Mirrors that still mirror the
main site would only get the standard distribution. The server could
either watch the Packages-r files for changes and reload them, and/or
accept a -HUP to force a reload once the ftp scripts complete the move
from incoming to the main site.

Also I wanted to make a small ammendment to the current proposal i have
clarifying something (please be sure you read that before taking this out
of context):

If a package depends on one or more restricted package it must also be
considered restricted (not in and of itself, but by association) and must
inherit all of the restrictions for any restricted package that it depends
on. For example:

my-package.deb (isn't restricted)
Depends: libRU, libAU

libAU can't be distributed in RU, and libRU can't be distributed in AU. So
if an AU mirror dowloads the dist it should not get libRU nor
my-package.deb (since it isnt usable without libRU). This inheritance
would make sure this scenario works correctly.

-- 
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Ben Collins <b.m.collins@larc.nasa.gov>                  Debian GNU/Linux
UnixGroup Admin - Jordan Systems Inc.                 bcollins@debian.org
------ -- ----- - - -------   ------- -- The Choice of the GNU Generation