[pacman-dev] MirrorBrain for mirrors?

[Peter Pöml]

Hi Dieter!

Am 03.07.2009 um 18:08 schrieb Dieter Plaetinck:
> Community effort (not official).   I've never seen the use of
> this, as our torrent files are webseed enabled. (eg you can do pull it
> with torrent + pull from various mirrors at the same time)

It's an interesting thing to note, and I haven't looked into that so  
far. For openSUSE, mirrors always turned out to be far more powerful  
then torrents, since P2P is always throttled by the total uplink  
capacity. We use it as supplement (through metalinks and separately).  
I also see torrent capacity be "filled" too slow, and disappearing too  
soon again, and only useful during the days when a download is  
extremely popular. But that might also be lack of organization by  
openSUSE or lack of interest in the community.

>> and I noticed usage for package management
>> being mentioned here:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalink#In_use
>> "Metalink is also being tested with Arch Linux's Pacman which is used
>> for package management."
>
> Not sure about that.
>>
>> openSUSE is switching to metalinks for downloads of packages and
>> metadata by the package management with the next release (using  
>> aria2c
>> in the background).  If you consider doing something similar,
>> MirrorBrain would be the perfect basis to deploy this.
>>
>
> "Simplicity" is on the top of our list of values, metalinks seem to
> introduce a layer of complexity (but it also brings some niceties).
> Imho I would look at the option of just using mirrorbrain as mirror
> manager and redirector, without the metalinks.

Yes, no problem as metalinks are optional.

>> I'd be very happy to help out with getting MirrorBrain up and running
>> for you guys, if you are interested!
>
> That's very nice.
> I've said it earlier, I think mirrorbrain looks very useful.  Though
> I'm afraid I don't have much spare time in reserve.

I think it always greatly helps if software like this is available in  
packaged form. I wonder if I could help out with packaging MirrorBrain  
for Arch Linux; I have experience in packaging RPMs (only).

> PS: Will you be at froscon by any chance?  Several Arch Linux guys  
> will
> be there.  (I was at fosdem too but missed your talk)

Good to know! I live in Cologne, so that's near. Let's see!

Peter