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 -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
