Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Re: autoredirect for savannah downloads

[Karl Berry]

    > ... http://ftpmirror.gnu.org

    That's awesome.  I knew such a thing is in the works, but didn't know
    it's actually running.  

It's actually been in place for quite a while (several months at least).

    Do you plan to advertise this service actively?  

I want to, I just haven't gotten it together to do so until now.  I did
put a note about it onto gnu.org/prep/ftp.html when I added the anchors
a couple days ago :).  What other important places come to mind?
server/mirror.html and announcing it on gnu-prog[-discuss], I guess.

    If it works reliably, we could even ask the major GNU/Linux distros to
    adjust their infrastructure to use it.  

It works pretty reliably.  We are using it in TeX Live for users to get
package updates, so it is getting hit a lot.  

    If it works reliably, we could even ask the major GNU/Linux distros
    to adjust their infrastructure to use it.

What I wonder about is this scenario:

- a distro hits the multiplexer, gets redirected to mirror X, all is fine.

- the next day, the same distro gets redirected to mirror Y, which
  happens to be a few hours older than mirror X and doesn't have
  everything that X does.

This does happen.  It would not be good for havoc to ensue.  Not that I
know anything specific about what distros do, but I doubt the distro
infrastructure is prepared to deal with it (or that they want to spend
time thinking about it).

The multiplexer does ignore mirrors that are "too old" (more than two
days currently) -- that's part of what the mirmon data is used for.
However, it didn't work well to cut it down more than that, because
there are inevitable lags between the the mirrors hitting the master
server and mirmon hitting the mirrors.

karl