MacPorts caching of distfiles [was Re: ntfs-3g 1.1120 source missing]

[Rainer Müller]

Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
> 
> On Feb 23, 2008, at 8:05 AM, William Siegrist wrote:
> 
>> So whats left? I think you'll want a special hostname for these? 
>> Maybe http://distfiles.macports.org/<group>/<port>/<file>?
> 
> I'm not sure what value <group> adds.  <port>/<file> would seem more 
> than reasonable, and a completely flat namespace even more so since it 
> then becomes very easy to add to the search path for all ports.

All distfiles in one single directory? I am against that at all!

<group> would be category, I think. But some ports also use the same 
distfiles by specifying distname (e.g. vim and vim-app). So maybe it 
would be better to use the distname of the regarding port to avoid 
mirroring files multiple times.
Although that takes away the category information. I even do not like 
the fact that /opt/local/var/macports/distfiles is not categorized. But 
the whole categories handling in MacPorts is a bit broken; that's 
another topic...

And it would be no problem to prepend URL with an advanced scheme to the 
master_sites list (or even add it at the end if the sourceforge mirror 
group is present, as said earlier). I think it would be just a bit more 
work to do it for ports using tagged mirrors also, but surely not 
impossible.

Rainer