[maemo-developers] Mirrors

[From: Jeff Moe]

On Sunday 03 January 2010 11:45:17 Jeremiah Foster wrote:
> On Jan 3, 2010, at 12:22, David Greaves wrote:
> > Jeff Moe wrote:
> >> As far as I can tell, there are no mirrors of the repositories.
> >
> > Pretty sure Nokia/maemo.org went with a CDN which satisfies all the
> > points you raised.
> >
> > The maemo.org infrastructure problems are more to do with dynamic content
> > and build services and are being addressed AFAIUI.
> 
> David is right on both counts. Most free software projects do have mirrors
>  but we are lucky in having Nokia as a partner in Maemo because they have
>  taken on the significant cost of pushing maemo.org content to mirrors. In
>  this case the mirrors are a top notch Content Delivery Network.

* That doesn't make us "lucky". The repositories are frequently down. If there 
were mirrors we could just point at the mirrors. They were down yesterday, for 
instance.

* Why not complement this "top notch" service with mirrors and get the best of 
both?

* I'm not talking dynamic content here. I'm talking a simple http repo. I 
understand that mirroring dynamic sites like talk, the wiki, bugzilla, etc. 
are harder to mirror.

* Every other single distro of note, whether community, corporate, or a mix 
has a mirror. Can you point me to one that doesn't? What makes Nokia's way so 
much better? Again, it would be much more convincing if it actually *worked* 
reliably.

What's the downside to having mirrored content?

> Garage is being replaced, you can see lots of information about that
>  progress on Maemork: http://www.qaiku.com/channels/show/maemork/

"Lots of infomation?" Like an occasional tweet? I have been following that.

> Garage has been a victim of its success and of the significant growth that
>  maemo has seen. Many people are working hard to make sure that garage will
>  continue to work smoothly for the whole community. I personally am working
>  towards that goal and I know that teams inside and outside Nokia are
>  working towards that too.

Yes, garage is slow and that is a bit understandable. Even that could be 
mirrored I'm guessing since sourceforge has lots of mirrors when you go to 
download and garage is running sf-esque code.  But I wasn't talking about 
garage in particular, I was talking about the repository. Surely the 
repository functioning isn't dependent on garage code. If so, garage should 
sync that over to another box which can be sync'd publicly.

Again, what's the downside to following the tried and true practices of every 
gnulinux distro of the last decade+?

-Jeff

P.S. Tangentally: change your /etc/resolv.conf nameservers and you get a 
different download server.