2007/9/29, eliott <eliott@cactuswax.net>:
Since we don't have a lot of mirrors I don't think it's reasonable to do 2-tier mirror network.
Yeah. If people want to do their own 2nd tier model, they can always use the wiki. *nods*
I propose the following: 1) Any mirror that is not synced from rsync.archlinux.org should not be listed in pacman's mirrorlist. Users could add any preferred mirror from "Unofficial mirrors" section on Wiki is enought IMO. Similarly there's no reason to have a long list of unofficial mirrors on Get Arch page. 2) All official mirrors should provide and keep up-to-date the following info: a) FTP/HTTP/rsync URLs it is highly recommended that they are the same, so users could easily change which protocol they like to use in pacman's mirrorlist, we could even add a comment to each server in pacman's mirrorlist indicating whether alternative protocol is available b) bandwidth (sometimes there are even different limits for local vs foreign users) c) email address of admin e) timeframes when mirror is synced 3) All official mirrors are recommended to use the script from http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Local_Mirror#The_synchronization_script with SYNC_REPO=() or SYNC_REPO=(core extra unstable testing community iso) 4) outdated or incomplete mirrors should be removed from pacman's mirrorlist and hosts.alllow 5) we should limit the number of official mirrors, depending on the size of country/region (e.g. not 15 mirrors for Vatican and 2 for USA :-P)
These all seem like very reasonable to me.
So do you think it makes sense to have a "mirror list" page that is perhaps linked off the downloads page?
Well, I think official mirror list can be kept on our download page (almost all official mirrors have iso dirs anyway, those who don't - deserve removal :-P). It can be a table with the following row format: mirror | FTP | HTTP | rsync | country ------------------------------------------------ mirror.domain.org | + | + | + | Country1 mir1.domain2.com | + | - | - | Country2 where mirror name should be a URL to the FTP (or HTTP if FTP does not exist) and those "+" (or some nice checkmark images) should be URLs of respective protocol. And put a link to 'Unofficial mirrors' section on wiki page. This way official mirrorlist will be clean and could be changed only by devs. -- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)