On Fri, 09 May 2014 11:39:02 -0400, Donald Stufft
On May 9, 2014, at 9:58 AM, M.-A. Lemburg
wrote: On 09.05.2014 13:44, Donald Stufft wrote:
On May 9, 2014, at 4:12 AM, M.-A. Lemburg
wrote: I snipped the rest of the discussion and reliability, using unmaintained packages and projects using their own mirrors (which should really be the standard, not an exceptional case), because it's not really leading anywhere: Using your own mirror shouldn’t be the standard if all you’re doing is automatically updating that mirror. It’s a hack to get around unreliability and it should be seen of as a sign of a failure to provide a service that people can rely on and that’s how I see it. People depend on this service and it’s irresponsible to not treat it as a critical piece of infrastructure.
I don't understand this. Why it is our responsibility to provide a free service for a large project to repeatedly download a set of files they need? Why does it not make more sense for them to download them once, and only update their local copies when they change? That's almost completely orthogonal to making the service we do provide reliable. For perspective, Gentoo requests that people only do an emerge sync at most once a day, and if they have multiple machines to update, that they only do one pull, and they update the rest of their infrastructure from their local copy. As another point of information for comparison, Gentoo downloads files from wherever they are hosted first, and only if that fails falls back to a Gentoo provided mirror (if I remember correctly...I think the Gentoo mirror copy doesn't always exist?). --David