web and ftp mirroring [was Jay's site organization plan]
> > Something I would like to do soon is encourage mirrors to provide
> > the archive via HTTP as well as FTP. HTTP has gotten to the point
> > where it should obsolete FTP for _anoynmous_ service, and Deity does
> > HTTP preferentially over FTP.
>
> What we need too is to have a standard naming for the http files. Do the
> all WWW mirrors mirror the distribution?
>
Nick has hit upon the problem here. It's not just standardizing the names
though. Who is going to provide the http access to the ftp archive?
Do we ask the web mirrors to also mirror the ftp archive? Only somewhere
around half (I haven't checked) of the web sites also mirror the ftp archive.
Do we ask the ftp mirrors to also serve the archive using http?
I have modified the requirements for official ftp mirrors to state that
they need to also need to serve the documents using http. We can't force
non-official mirrors to do anything. I will try to get all the current
official ftp mirrors to serve the files this way. This doesn't really solve
the problem though.
Another option is to force web mirrors to also carry the ftp archive. I know
that a number of current web mirrors would not be able to do this. This is
probably what our goal should be. We should be able to find at least 8 sites
around the globe that could do this. It would erase the difference between
official ftp and web mirrors and would allow the web pages to point directly
into the ftp archive (which would avoid some duplication and simplify
things). Just keep in mind that this approach could lead to us losing some
of our current web mirrors. Having only one kind of official mirror also
solves the problem of naming the sites.
The only possible drawback besides finding sites to host both the ftp and
web stuff is bandwidth. Will putting both of these on the same sites cause
problems?
Independent of the above, we should keep track of the unofficial ftp mirrors
that also provide http access. I have written to the maintainer of the mirror
list to see if they are willing to keep a list of such sites.
- Jay
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