Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Mirrors and remote repositories...

[David A. Wheeler]

David Brown <address@hidden> said:
>It is frequent that the user of a mirror has no idea where the
>source repository even is. They might not even have access to it.

Yes, exactly.  And even if they know, they shouldn't need to.
The TOOL needs to keep track of that stuff.
Bookkeeping archive interrelationships, and making common
operations easy, is just what a tool should do.

Obviously, if the user doesn't HAVE write access, that's different.
But if the authority is there, let'em do it.



Tom Lord said:
>The fact is that the general idea of a "write past mirror" fits in
>hella cleanly with the code and the architecture.

I agree!

>Arch is entering a stage of life where much of the development
>is about _detailing_ -- adding little curly-q's here and there
>that hit this or that niche requirement.

Yes indeed.  Which is why, when I looked over arch, I
concentrated on the 'details that make a tool easy to use',
once I found that the basic capabilities (except Windows support)
was there. There's no point in worrying about ease-of-use
for a useless tool.


>David: I don't think that commits against mirrors should be
>_automatically_ redirected. Rather, I'd like to see a mechanism so
>that you can separately register the read and write halves of a single
>archive name.

That sounds very good, it's certainly flexible.
To make that reasonable, I think meta-information about that
needs to be recorded in the archive so that by default the
"right information" is filled in.

>The next question then is what to do about
>auto-updating the mirror during reads.

Do you mean when I get from a mirror, automatically checking the
mirrored original and if the mirror is obsolete fixing the mirror?
That sounds like an interesting option, but it seems to me that
that might really screw up disconnected operations (where you CAN'T
access the original).  Or do you mean something else?

--- David A. Wheeler