Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Andrew <afrayedknot AT thefrayedknot.armory.com>]

On Sat, Aug 21, 2004 at 03:43:51AM +0200, Ladislav Hagara wrote:
> > > It is the sorcery's job.
> > Everything is sorcery's job, it should do your laundry too, I hate doing
> > laundry, want me to come over and make some cake while we wait?
> 
> Why this insult? :-((
I wasn't trying to be insulting, just playing on the endless stream of
feature requests that most pieces of software tend to get, which then leads
to bloatware, and thus an even deeper pit of bugs :-) All software
eventually expands to read mail. Or something like that...

> Why to change hundreds spells if required functionality can be written only 
> once and added into sorcery?
The problem is, what would we change it to, theres nothing one can really
do here without hurting another case.

The old algorithm is, try the users url, if that fails goto slow fallbacks
one of which might have the source. Now the algorithm is, avoid the fallbacks
if we can by checking the other mirrors. This makes the assumption that
spell writers/updaters actually downloaded the source in a reasonable
amount of time somehow and the spells arent hopeless out of date...

You see the subtles of my actions revealed :) The hidden motivators,
all part of my master plan!

>  
> 
> > > It this MIRROR doesn't contain sources, sorcery should CHECK Main Site
> > Seeing as how most of the lists have the main site listed at the top,
> > if you dont use netselect thats the next one it should use, problem 
> > solved.
> 
> Yes, you are right. Just trying devel sorcery.
> Problem is the stable sorcery doesn't have this "trying next MIRRORS" 
> functionality yet.
Yep, only devel :) Perhaps its bait to get people to find other problems
in devel before we call devel stable :)

> 
> 
> > Checking is dumb, if its there you may as well download it too IMO
> > (see my phone conversation).
> 
> Main Site can be very slow or we do not want to overload it.
This is what netselect is for, it picks the fastest ones first. Checking
uses resources for the server as well, it requires opening a tcp
connection, forking a process on the server and doing filesystem access,
all to just disconnect and start over if it succeeds.

> 
> 
> > >If Main Site doesn't contain sources (trying to download old version)
> > It wont download the old version because the file is named
> > uniquely. Either its there or it isnt.
> 
> What about if it isn't there just now? 
Then maybe its somewhere else.

> There was some bug and sources version x.y.z was removed from Main Site and 
> all MIRRORS and spell still contains x.y.z version.
Well this would be a) a security problem, in which case we have measures
in place to update the spells, or b) the author on a whim decided to
remove his latest and greatest software for no reason and not tell anyone
(has this ever happened?) or c) we're so far behind that the author has
moved on to z.z.z. and the spell should be updated.

> 
> 
> > We do use fallback mirrors if all the other mirrors fail.
> 
> In this example neither Main Site nor MIRRORS contain it. 
> Why should sorcery try hundreds MIRRORS?

How are we supposed to know before we try? :-)
I guess an enhancement to the mirror expanding would be to let the
user configure the the number of additional mirrors we try before going
to fallback.

Ideally we shouldnt ever be missing a source file, if it does you should
file a bug, spells should not have missing sources :-)

-Andrew