[MacPorts] #60590: Macports mirrors are down?

[Clemens Lang]

On Thu, Jun 04, 2020 at 02:38:20PM -0400, Herby G wrote:
> Anything to be done about having such a single point of failure like
> this in MacPorts infra?

Unfortunately running our own rsync server costs us money, so ever since
our server hardware is no longer being sponsored by Apple a couple of
years ago, we have relied on the services of University of
Erlangen-Nuremberg to run our main mirror for us. This main mirror syncs
all its contents from a private mirror that is run by Ryan Schmidt,
which is where the buildbots put the files.

This has served us well so far, and the downtime of this mirror would
not be a big issue if it weren't for rsync – for all other attempts to
download from a mirror, MacPorts will automatically fall back to other
mirrors.

We could extend the code that updates MacPorts itself and the ports tree
[1,2] with retying at some of the other mirrors (although this may have
undesired effects if you sync with a mirror that happens to have an
older state than what you have locally), or switch to a different
source, e.g. git [3], or a http server, preferrably using some diff
mechanism to avoid downloading the entire thing from scratch every time.

None of those have been implemented yet, because it would require quite
a bit of work to get all the corner cases right (e.g. we do care about
the timestamps of the synced files). If you want to help out, that would
be welcome.

[1] https://github.com/macports/macports-base/blob/master/src/macports1.0/selfupdate.tcl#L69-L84
[2] https://github.com/macports/macports-base/blob/master/src/macports1.0/macports.tcl#L2663-L2694
[3] https://trac.macports.org/wiki/howto/SyncingWithGit

HTH,
-- 
Clemens