Hi, Antero Mejr <m...@antr.me> writes:
> Maxim Cournoyer <ma...@guixotic.coop> writes: > >> Some kind of automatically geographically selected mirror could be >> useful. It'd be the one closest to your place, hopefully being faster >> while saving bandwidth on the main build farms. > > Would this require a GCD then? Adding a mirror selection option to the > installer seems uncontroversial and not too complicated, especially if > we let users choose a mirror rather than trying to geolocate them. The > servers from the libreplanet list can be hard coded into the selection > prompt to start. I'm not sure; to me the GCDs are mostly useful when needing lots of feedback from the community because of touching parts that will impact most people/break APIs/conventions/etc, or when the design requires the input of many people to generate ideas. In this case I think I'd just try to assemble a team of volunteers to look at the question and come up with an actionable plan. Perhaps these could be a rough plan of how it could go: 1) Documentation in the manual for the rsync command to run 1.1) A successful rsync run should leave a control file whose mtime would reveal when the last successful sync occurred (maybe rsync has a switch to do that) 2) Figure out how to have a "geographically dispatched" URL/DNS that would resolve the closest mirror from a user's IP address and use it automatically, when using e.g. mirrors.guix.gnu.org. Probably Debian and other distros can be consulted for examples of how to do that. 3) Make a NEWS entry advertising mirrors.guix.gnu.org After a while, if mirrors.guix.gnu.org works well, we could consider making it the default. As discussed before, the complete nars collection is huge at around 20 TiB or something. This could be halved by dropping the lzma substitutes, so in my opinion is also a worthwhile goal to pursue (the issue here is to find a way to notify users on old daemon that they should upgrade to avoid being left out of substitutes or worse, with a malfunctioning deamon). -- Thanks, Maxim
