From: Kenneth Knowles <kknowles@berkeley.edu>
> On Fri, Apr 16, 2004 at 05:17:14PM +0100, Richard Jones wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 16, 2004 at 09:12:18AM -0700, Kenneth Knowles wrote:
> > > > CPAN (the global repository)
> > > -> The Humps for the "place" / GODI's data files
> > 
> > I'm pretty sure that GODI is *not* like CPAN, fundamentally because
> > CPAN actually stores the source tarballs.  This is essential if you
> > want to set up a reliable distributed system which doesn't depend on
> > the vaguaries of uptimes of multiple small sites.
> 
> Ah, I see.  Gentoo does both - defaulting to your SRC_URI only if the Gentoo
> mirror downloads fail.  This is just a matter of someone choosing to do the
> hosting, yes, and then very minor changes to GODI to check that location first,
> before going to the "multiple small sites"?
> 
> Step 1: make sure the GODI maintainers are interested in this model
> Step 2: get hosting
> Step 3: tweak GODI

There's nothing to tweak: GODI is based on BSD ports, which already
provide for this. Usually a BSD distribution comes with a distfile
directory, which contains all the files needed by all the ports, at
least those for which the licensing allows redistribution.

But then you need a site with sufficient bandwidth to support
potentially a lot of downloads of different packages.
So step 2 is probably the most difficult one.

The point in the BSD approach is not to avoid distributing the full
sources, but to avoid making this a requirement. In particular the
mirroring may be slower than the distribution of the meta files, but
you still want to be able to use the latest version. Also this makes sure
that the packaging is made as patches to the distributed sources, so
that upgrading to a new version is easier.
(Gentoo's portage is just a reimplementation of BSD ports to linux.)

Jacques Garrigue

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