[SM-Discuss] Do you download our products fast enough?

Jeremy Blosser jblosser-smgl at firinn.org
Tue Apr 22 18:04:45 EDT 2008


On Apr 18, Eric Sandall [eric at sandall.us] wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> In the past we have turned down extra hosting for mirrors (not just fallback 
> mirrors, but full mirrors such as dbg and ibiblio) as our current mirrors are 
> more than sufficient.

This gets asked in IRC about every 6 months but I don't know the answer is
sufficiently archived in the ML.  The main issue with mirrors is they are a
pain to maintain; for every 1 person who offers a mirror and keeps it
current, there's another 2 or 3 that set up a mirror once and either don't
keep it up to date or drop off entirely.  The work involved in keeping the
list current is way more than the benefit, because people are just so
generous they all want offer mirrors they can't actually keep up with.

I have done a fair amount of work in the past setting up a system that
allows us to have mirrors offered and automate the work of checking which
are current and only pointing people to those.  It got sidelined because of
incompatible demands for how up to date people think the grimoires need to
be vs. what's a reasonable update window to force on mirrors, as well as
some problems introducing the notion of a session so that temporary skew
between mirrors wouldn't cause problems with eg a tarball coming from one
server and its signature coming from another.  At the time there were more
pressing issues, especially since as noted we have a couple of really
decent primary distribution sites already.  I don't doubt this will get
picked up again at some point, it just hasn't been any kind of priority.
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