[pacman-dev] slower ftp access with pacman 3 ?

[Dan McGee]

On 5/8/07, Xavier <shiningxc at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2007/5/8, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com>:
> >
> > That one is problematic and is due to the symlinking on the servers.
> > There's no way to know what it should do because 'PWD' returns the
> > wrong directory.
> >
>
> yes, I was just wondering if it was possible to detect symlinks, but I
> don't think ftp allows this.
>
> > Ideally we need to fix the ftp setup on the main servers and the
> > mirrors though (0.8 should be a symlink to current, not the other way
> > around).  But you could try using the 0.8 path in your mirror config
> > and see if that helps.
> >
>
> I don't know, I find it more logical to have current pointing to the
> current version.
> Having it the other way around would indeed solve the problem, but I
> find it a bit odd.
> Using 0.8 in the config directly indeed works, since it's a real directory.
>
> Anyway, this problem only occurs when downloading several packages from current.
> For syncing, it has to change path for each repo (current, then extra,
> then ...), so there is another problem. Did the ftp code change a lot
> between pacman 2 and pacman 3?

Yes, pacman moved from libftp to libdownload, a port of the BSD
libfetch to Linux.

> Also, why is ftp used by default for all mirrors, even though many are
> available through both protocols. What's wrong with http? It has much
> faster access, but maybe also some obvious downsides I don't know
> about?

Change the mirror file if you want. We aren't going to list duplicates
of every server in the file, it is quite long as is.

I for one find FTP to be a faster protocol over a good connection-
this is usually due to server setup because their ftp daemon is set up
to serve small numbers of large files, while http is set up to serve
large numbers of small files. Maybe that is all placebo effect, but I
seem to notice it.

-Dan