[arch-projects] [netctl] ftp.archlinux.org

[Florian Pritz]

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


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