Re: [gentoo-dev] Policy on RESTRICT=[no]mirror and use of mirror://foo/

[Corey Shields <cshields@gentoo.org>]

On Thursday 05 May 2005 02:04 pm, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> Unless there is something I've missed, why do we have ebuilds with
> RESTRICT=nomirror, having a GPL-2 license, and distributed via
> sourceforge? Wouldn't RESTRICT=primaryuri be much better? Most fetches
> would go to SF first, and we'd still have a copy available on our
> mirrors.

At one point in time someone suggested that we may as well utilize other 
people's mirror networks that are already out there, rather than our own.  
This then got implemented for stuff like sourceforge packages.

Unfortunately this plays hell for lots of people.  If you have a local mirror, 
then you get files fast and without using your outside bandwidth.  Having to 
wait for a file from some mirror in zimbabwe because "that package already 
has a mirror structure" defeats the purpose of running a local mirror.

On top of that, if you have a private network (RFC 1918) with a gentoo mirror 
on the inside, you can't reach the SRC_URI on restrict=nomirror packages, and 
they don't end up on the mirror anyway.  We had this problem on dozens of 
servers at IU..  At one point in time even gentoo-sources was marked 
nomirror, since kernel.org had their own network.

I think that nomirror should be used as seldom as possible.  Licensing issues 
are legit.  We've had one case where mirror admins complained about a file 
that was too big (a 2 gig neverwinter nights file), but otherwise I have 
talked with them before about releasing "nomirror" wherever we can, and they 
didn't mind.

If someone wants to put the "Official" stamp on the licensing/nomirror policy, 
that would be great.  Just as important, I think we need to backtrack and 
clear out that restriction wherever it is unnecessarily used.

Cheers,

-C

-- 
Corey Shields
Gentoo Linux Infrastructure Team and Devrel Team
Gentoo Foundation Board of Trustees
http://www.gentoo.org/~cshields
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