Raul Miller writes ("Re: ld.so (fwd)"):
> Ian Jackson:
> : IMO the real solution is to have a real FTP method for dselect that
> : only gets the first few bytes of each package to check what it is.
> : This is doable, but someone has to go and write it.
>
> Sure, but this doesn't exist yet. Is it likely to soon? [I sure
> don't have the time -- I practically burned myself out last week.]
I don't think there are any immediate plans, but a rudimentary version
that downloads everything would be quite straightforward.
> : If people want to keep a mirror of our FTP archive then they don't
> : need a program like dftp.
>
> dftp is analogous to a mirror -- but takes less storage.
Unfortunately it doesn't work properly :-).
> : So, in summary, I think dftp is a mistake.
>
> Bringing down only part of each package followed by all of most
> packages isn't necessarily going to be more efficient. Having two
> distinct package names spaces where one will do isn't necessarily very
> elegant.
No, but (for example) I don't think we can ensure that package names
and version numbers are strictly seperable.
> It's true that dselect has more feature than dftp, but other than that
> why would you classify dftp as a mistake?
I think that was rather harsh of me, actually. It's a reasonably good
idea, but it relies on things it shouldn't rely on - which means we're
getting bug reports about things that dftp doesn't like.
Ian.
