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

[Jouke Witteveen]

On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 2:44 PM, Florian Pritz via arch-projects
<arch-projects at archlinux.org> wrote:
> 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.

Thanks, this is a welcome explanation of the way it is. It might be
useful to document this somewhere, although maybe Google will be able
to lead you to this specific message.

One reason a different URL could be desirable is because for netctl it
is not really the case that "it is difficult to find a stable or
publicly available URL for the source tarballs," but the archlinux
servers are in fact the location for the source tarballs. For example,
the discontinuation of ftp.archlinux.org has caused the gentoo package
to break. This was the reason behind my first question.

>> 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.

Understood.

Thanks again,
- Jouke