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

Rainer Müller raimue at macports.org
Sun Feb 24 21:29:08 PST 2008


Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
>> All distfiles in one single directory? I am against that at all!
> 
> Why?  Collisions?   If so, please name the collisions in question,  
> because I cannot find any.

Maybe not yet, but maybe they will come in later? Why not be collisions 
aware?

> If you add indirection to this then you lose the ability to have a  
> global URL path that points to a mirror (either that or you need to  
> add extra logic to the MacPorts fetch code).

Why are you against adding more logic to the fetch code?

>> <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.
> 
> Or you could just use a flat namespace... :-)

And have one big cluttered directory without any links which file 
belongs to which port? With the distname approach, it adapts the layout 
of /opt/local/var/macports/distfiles where distfiles are currently 
stored locally.

> I fail to understand this stubborn insistence on date stamp and group  
> information for files which are simply not meant to be user visible.   
> There is no group information you need to see on the distfile mirror  
> because you won't be managing the distfile mirror.

But maybe I want to see what files are on a mirror for some specific 
port without having to look through a list of all distfiles ever 
referenced by any port.

>> 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.
> 
> This is over-engineering at its finest.

Please explain why? It would give us the possibility to prefer some
mirror lists (e.g. sourceforge) which already got a world wide location
aware mirror network. It would not be good to throw that away and use 
the one single mirror (in case even overseas) instead.

Rainer


More information about the macports-dev mailing list