[Mageia-dev] Mirror tree structure

[Michael Scherer]

Le mercredi 20 octobre 2010 à 18:34 +0200, Olivier Thauvin a écrit :
> Hi,
> 
> You can find here:
> http://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/Mageia/
> the current mirror tree proposal.
> We now have to discuss it, I think.
> 
> Here notes:
> 
> The 'mageia_timestamp' is a file updated on the main server every 5
> minutes. It allow to check is a mirror synced or not
> 
> Comparing to mandriva there is no more split between devel/stable, all
> distributions goes into distribs/ and all isos file into iso/.
> 
> The updates/ tree disapear, avoiding some possible dependencies issues
> in updates rpms.
> 
> The peoples/ directory is dedicated to contributors and must allow
> anyone to share files related to the distribution (testing rpms,
> preworks) in an unofficial ways.
> How this can be setup in practice still have to be discuss.

Like quota, etc ?

> Finally the software/ directory should allow you to distribute the
> tarball (not rpm) for software we do. As soon we do free software people
> must be able to distribute our code in the same way any projects does.
> Replies like "svn is readable" or "we have rpm" is not appropriated.
> 
> Now come the question: "what is a valid mirror ?", eg, what a mirror
> should have as file to be valid ?
> 
> I suggest to not give the choice and avoid mistake by saying except
> "peoples" a mirror must respect the whole tree to be valid.

I would also exclude software/ from regular mirror, because this may not
requires as much redundancy than regular mirror ( ie, I doubt many
people will download tarball on a regular basis, and most softwre
project are fine with 2 or 3 mirror ).

On the other hand, it may not add much overhead to mirrors anyway.


Something I would like to add is database dumps ( cleaned from password
and private information, of course ), and maybe svn backup, stuff like
that. So people who wish to fork our project will not have the same
problem as we did.

One of the issue we currently have is the fact we couldn't fork Mandriva
wiki, because we didn't have access to the server. The same goes for
several components ( ideas, maintainers database, full bugzilla dump,
etc ). One of my goal would be to have a forkable infrastructure, so
people can replicate ours ( using puppet/cfengine, as we plan to use ).
( replicate to study, replicate it to play with it, replicate to enhance
it if needed )

And this would also provides use with a "linus t" backup system :p


> This mean everything must exists with this structure under the top level
> path.
> This way may avoid issues like mandriva on ibiblio (only 2005 and 2007.1
> seems to exists...)
> ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/mandriva/Mandrivalinux/

I would let people choose what they mirror based on version. Ie, someone
could mirror the last version only, the 3 last, etc, etc.

This will likely provides enough flexibility without sacrifing too much
the simplicity.
-- 
Michael Scherer