From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 17271 invoked by uid 1002); 5 Dec 2003 16:22:36 -0600 Mailing-List: contact gentoo-portage-dev-help@gentoo.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail Reply-To: gentoo-portage-dev@gentoo.org X-BeenThere: gentoo-portage-dev@gentoo.org Received: (qmail 25160 invoked from network); 5 Dec 2003 16:22:35 -0600 Message-ID: <3FD0FFA9.5060009@gentoo.org> Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2003 16:59:05 -0500 From: Sandy McArthur User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20031029 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: gentoo-portage-dev@gentoo.org References: <200312050158.17479.george@gentoo.org> <1070643286.6073.173.camel@ht.gentoo.org> In-Reply-To: <1070643286.6073.173.camel@ht.gentoo.org> X-Enigmail-Version: 0.76.4.0 X-Enigmail-Supports: pgp-inline, pgp-mime Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam-Status: No, hits=0.0 required=6.1 tests=none autolearn=no version=2.60 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.60 (1.212-2003-09-23-exp) on audrey.leeprinting.com Subject: [gentoo-portage-dev] portage-ng wish list X-Archives-Salt: eb3cafb5-217d-400f-92aa-73aa21749a86 X-Archives-Hash: 43b3918b61ac8d0c420237e75a6912b1 Daniel Robbins wrote: > focus on the capabilities you want in Portage first. Tell us about > these. These need to be documented first. Well, I think I'd like to see implemented: 1. Better mirror detection. Currenty portage uses hard coded data with a touch of randomness either from DNS RR or via picking one choice from a list. Little is done to pick the best mirror for the user. I think portage should query for a current list of mirrors using DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD) and perform some simple connectectiviy tests to find the "best" mirror. After portage has discovered the "best" mirror it constructs a url as needed, be it rsync or wget. A reasonable caching method for the connectectivity tests would be good too. DNS-SD is currently an internet standard draft which is used by Zeroconf but it doesn't depend on Zeroconf. It is well thought out and can support things like path components which would be needed for a distfile mirror since that is more than hostname and a fixed path. More info at: http://www.dns-sd.org/ and http://files.dns-sd.org/draft-cheshire-dnsext-dns-sd.txt 2. Moving the default location for distfiles from /usr/portage/distfiles to /var/cache/distfiles . Write access to /usr should only be needed when installing a new package. I should also be able to export a NFS mount of a portage tree readonly and share it across a cluster. ------------ Below here are wild ideas that probably need more baking but I'll throw them out there anyway. 3. Make it so the portage tree is sparse until part of it is requested. There are thousands of packages in the portage tree and I use maybe a few hundred. Why can't I enable an online mode that only rsyncs the herds and empty package dirs until I try to `emerge herd/foo`. Then it rsyncs the package fetching the ebuilds and related files as they are needed. While this would make many times more connections to rsync mirrors the amount of bandwidth would be a lot less because if I'm a KDE user and don't touch Gnome then when changes happen to Gnome packages I don't have to use bandwidth to sync them as I don't care about each little update to packages I haven't installed. 4. Support Zero Install as a portage mirroring system. Zero Install seems to be httpfs but doesn't require anything special about the web server so that we could take advanage of existing web servers as mirrors. More info at: http://zero-install.sourceforge.net/ 5. Do something to speed up the long 'updating portage cache' step in a `emerge sync`. 6. Support bittorrent distfile distrobution. Sandy McArthur -- gentoo-portage-dev@gentoo.org mailing list