On Sun, 2005-03-27 at 07:05, Greg Knaddison wrote:
> >
> > Couldn't something like subversion be put under the covers to
> > allow atomic commits of all dependent packages at once into
> > the repository and allow upgrades (or downgrades) to tags or
> > timestamps? This seems like a job that needs exactly the set
> > of functions provided by a revision control package.
> >
>
> If you required the packages to be in a SVN/CVS repository, that's
> quite an extra load on the server just to be a package mirror, so many
> (all?) of the freelly donated mirrors would stop doing it for free.
That's a good point - I guess all the work should be done on the
client side.
> I
> use a local repository and find it to be not only more reliable (I
> control exactly what is in it) but also much easier to work with.
How do you deal with updating your mirror when the parent is also
being updated and is in an inconsistent state? Do you keep two
local copies so you can overlap testing new versions with installs
and updates of the tested versions?
> I
> can add my own packages and it is MUCH faster than even the fastest of
> nearby mirrors.
You can add additional separate repositories for non-standard contents,
and pulling the content through a caching proxy takes care of keeping
a copy of what you need nearby. If you have machines in multiple
locations you probably don't want to maintain local mirrors for
all of them.
> I think that you ask for too much from the mirrors/distributions.
> Having people add in code is something that you can get shared freely,
> there is no large cost to sharing code.
I'm just asking for consistent and predictable results, and hoping that
the coders would like to provide that.
> Adding in
> repositories/mirrors that have lots of extra benefits like this which
> require actual non-trivial costs (disk space, revision system
> overhead) - then, in my mind, you are moving into the area of a paid
> service.
Perhaps, but I've been amazed so far at what people are doing for free
and was hoping that the remaining problems were just oversights that
grew out of trying to copy the apt system and applying piecemeal patches
to fix the things it omits. The reason I mentioned subversion is that
it is at least a 2nd generation revision control system that is designed
around the issues that need to be resolved. There could be a more
mirror-friendly way to do it, although I can't think of one off the top
of my head that will fix the inconsistent repository issue if you
can't control the order of file transfers among the mirrors. Does
anyone know how the source-based gentoo system handles the repositories?
--
Les Mikesell
les@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
