[arch-general] 'Local mirror' page was removed from wiki

[C Anthony Risinger]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 12:51 AM, Nathan Wayde <disposaboy at konnichi.com> wrote:
> from the sounds of it all those solutions require an internet connection. my
> use-case is about installing on-demand what i want without an internet
> connection - the same reason i never clear my cache when i uninstall stuff.
> If i'm on the train and working on a presentation or something and i need to
> make some graphic i need to know that i will have the apps i need. this has
> saved me before where apps i had were inadequate for something that popped
> up while i had no internet connection. the fact that i synced everything to
> my desktop then copied it onto my laptop meant that i wasn't syncing the
> mirror twice.

hmm, yeah that seems like a good case i suppose; it is very similar to
the use case i had with ubuntu... no possible internet connection, and
not knowing ahead of time, at all, what packages would be needed
(hardware/etc.).

> you do realize the average daily sync in repo is only a few hundred megs
> right? and that's mainly because of the large packages which come in
> occasionally like kde gnome, OOo, eclipse, etc.

yes; once you have defeated "the big download", then it's much
lighter... albeit hundreds of megs multiplied out is still a
significant number.  i'm not against the idea of local mirrors, i just
think they are not appropriate for 90+% of users, and should created
with discretion.  in my ubuntu case, it took _forever_ to download,
then i tried to move it to another disk and corrupted the whole damn
thing somehow; what a waste.

> and i don't see how removing the wiki solves anything, it rather makes it
> worse IMHO. it was simply removed with a vague message pointing to a wiki
> that doesn't do much better. iirc there was supposedly a warning at the top
> of the original wiki and no-one ever read it. this sounds to me like someone
> fancies them-self a mind-reader or something. on a more serious note, let's
> be honest and say that putting a warning at the top of a page with several
> subsections that warns mostly about something further down the page is just
> idiotic.

i'm really at a loss here; i'm not sure if i ever even saw this page
in it's original form.  ultimately, i do think the practice should be
discouraged, but there is little to gain from trying to obscure it
either.

> well the ARM is like an archive it's not really a public mirror like the
> rest, it's a last resort kinda thing. the idea is that is wants to cache
> every package (or as much as possible) that hits the repos, if my script is
> gonna cause a problem then I'd very much like to know about it but alas
> no-one seems to know what these problems are.

while i haven't used the ARM service, i have read (and even written
indirectly) about it; it is a great idea.  I am actually _all_ about
the "everyone has it all" idea, but in the form of a new,
next-generation package manager, and a P2P-based distribution
platform, where we can all benefit from each other's leechiness :-)

at any rate, i don't have anything further to add that's of interest
or useful; i trust further arguments will be respected, and a sound
compromise can be discovered.

C Anthony