On 04.06.2016 17:59, Jouke Witteveen via arch-projects wrote:
I cannot find much information about sources.archlinux.org and have several questions about it.
1. Will it still exist in a couple of years? It would be nice to have the sources at a somewhat fixed location.
Yes, that URL is hosted our infrastructure and will stay around.
2. What is the meaning of the "other/packages" part of te path? Why can we not use sources.archlinux.org/netctl/ or sources.archlinux.org/other/netctl/? I could not find any documentation about this.
For some packages it is difficult to find a stable or publicly available URL for the source tarballs. Since we need a reachable URL in our PKGBUILDs we mirror such tarballs in the /other/ subtree. netctl doesn't have a dedicated website and no dedicated source tarball hosting so it falls into this category. We used to have such packages directly in /other/, but I'm not entirely sure why that was abandoned and things moved to subdirectories. I guess it probably has something to do with the distinction between TUs and devs since TUs can not access the /other/packages/ directory. They can only access /other/community/. Besides the /other directory, there is also /sources which contains sourcepackages (makepkg --source) that we are required to provide thanks to the GPL. The sources.archlinux.org subdomain came into existence because nymeria has a rather slow network connection and I didn't want to enable public access there for all those files. I also didn't want to reuse ftp.archlinux.org so that I don't cause confusion about what this domain is used for. I also like using different subdomains for different things so it is easier to move them around in the future without breaking old URLs. Is there any reason why you'd want a different URL or is it just a matter of understanding the reasoning here? In the second case, I hope my explanation helps a bit.
3. Uploading the sources happens to nymeria.archlinux.org:/srv/ftp/[...]. Shouldn't this be renamed (linked for compatibility) to (from) nymeria.archlinux.org:/srv/sources/[...] for consistency?
/srv/ftp/ is the place where pretty much all of our repo related data is located. This includes the sources, but also the packages and our ISOs. Changing this is pretty complex and /srv/ftp is also the root directory for our mirrors. Most choose not to mirror the sources and other directories though. While the "ftp" part is slightly misleading, I don't see the value in investing time into changing it. Given the sources are not the only content /srv/sources would be just as misleading as /srv/ftp is now. Florian