Mirrors et al. (was Re: New Markets)
Craig Sanders <cas@muffin.pronet.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 19 Apr 1996, Bruce Perens wrote:
>
> > > Wouldn't it make more sense to call the directory debian-1.1/ right
> > > from the start, and make unstable a symbolic link to it?
> >
> > We did that once, and will never do it again. Someone put it on their
> > CD-ROM as 1.1 a few months ago.
>
> Yes, I'm well aware of that. That broken infomagic disk with alpha 1.0
> debian on it was the number one reason why i couldn't recommend Debian
> to people who didn't have a good fast net connection.
>
> I think it's the wrong "solution", though.
>
> /home/ftp/debian$ du -s unstable
> 157434 unstable
>
> What it means is that merely to prevent someone from making a stupid,
> easily avoidable mistake all the mirror sites are going to have to
> re-fetch about 157MB of stuff that they already have. How many
> mirror sites are there? Probably at least 10 connecting directly to
> ftp.debian.org, so that's 1.57GB of garbage that gets sent out of
> ftp.debian.org unnecessarily.
I thought we came up with a good solution to all this shortly after the 1.0
debacle? (Bruce seems to have alluded to this in another part of his
message.) That was to give each release a code name which would be used for
the directory name, and then "stable", "unstable", "1.1", etc. would all be
symbolic links to the relevant code name, with the version number links only
put in *after* they were officially released. That way, no directories are
renamed, and unreleased version numbers don't exist.
Still, if the new unstable were created the same way as last time, by
duplicating the stable tree, you'd still have a flood of packages to mirror,
so one could argue that the same effect could be achieved by leaving the
unstable as is (to continue being "unstable"), and creating the versioned
directory as the duplicate.
The only way I can see of avoiding the package flood would be to use
symbolic links from unstable to stable for those packages which haven't been
modified yet. Are there any undesirable consequences for mirror with
symbolic links changing to regular files? Anyway, this could work would by
using the code name scheme above, but still, in moving to that scheme, there
would still have to be one "flood" change-over.
> Great. So i can look forward to downloading another copy of the 157mb
> of the same stuff i've already spent a few days downloading. Too bad if
> I want to use my PPP link for anything else while it's happening.
I'm sure we can arrange for advance notice on this list of the change, so
anyone who wants to can disable their mirror just before it, move things by
hand, re-enable after it, and not have to endure the flood. (I believe this
has been done before.)
> Hey, here's another idea:
>
> Set up a second anonymous ftp account, say "deb-anon". Make debian-1.1/
> unreadable by "anonymous" but readable by "deb-anon". Those who bother
> to find out about the deb-anon account can presumably be trusted to
> know the difference between stable & unstable versions. When it's
> time to release 1.1 as the latest official version, just change the
> ownership/permissions of the directory to let "anonymous" have access to
> it.
Then there'll be a bunch of mirrors who want to mirror the unstable stuff,
and they'll all need the same set up or we still wouldn't avoid the problem.
Warwick
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Warwick Harvey email: warwick@cs.mu.OZ.AU
Department of Computer Science phone: +61-3-9287-9171
University of Melbourne fax: +61-3-9348-1184
Parkville, Victoria, AUSTRALIA 3052 web: http://www.cs.mu.OZ.AU/~warwick
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