Adding distfiles to the repository (was: Re: iso-codes 3.1 cannot download)

[Ryan Schmidt]

List,

I'm bringing this discussion to the list from private mail between me  
and Blair Zajac:

On Jul 17, 2008, at 16:18, Blair Zajac wrote:

> Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
>> On Jul 17, 2008, at 11:57, Blair Zajac wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Ryan,
>>>
>>> Do you have a copy of the iso-codes-3.1.tar.gz we can put up in  
>>> the svn repos? Right now the ftp://pkg-isocodes.alioth.debian.org/ 
>>> pub/pkg-isocodes/ URL isn't loading at all and at some sites,  
>>> such as my port, we cannot use ftp:// URLs and only http:// URLs,  
>>> so having this in our repos would make it work there.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Blair
>>
>> I'll fix this. See #15981.
>
> I put the tarball into our svn dist location, so it can be  
> downloaded using http.  I don't know if the r38372 is needed, as it  
> worked for me without this change.

I think we should not add distfiles to the Subversion repository  
anymore. They take up lots of room. I could make thousands of  
portfile edits in the amount of disk space used by a single distfile.  
I would rather use 1K in the repository to add a new distfiles mirror  
to the portfile than use 5MB to store a copy of the distfile. There  
is "no way" to remove data from the repository "ever" [1] so it has  
always seemed like the wrong place to put distfiles. And thankfully  
we now have a much better solution in the distfiles mirror. I think  
the only reason to add a distfile to the repository is if the  
distfiles mirror is unable to mirror it for some technical reason,  
and that should be rare.

I don't know if the Guide mentions putting distfiles into the  
repository, but if it does, it should be changed to talk about the  
distfiles mirror.