[Kolab-devel] Proposal: Encourage downloading kolab from mirrors in a nicer way

[Thomas Arendsen Hein]

Hi!

As many of you already have noticed, http and ftp access to the
Kolab server packages from ftp.kolab.org was disabled a while ago.
Some people used automatic downloaders to fetch all existing
versions and this way transfered identical files again and again
causing huge amounts of traffic where rsync would have only
transfered a symlink.

It is time to replace this quick&dirty solution with something
reasonable. Here is a proposal for a new solution:

- There will be a page http://kolab.org/download/... which will show
  working links to all known mirrors, i.e. the page:
    http://kolab.org/download/server/development/current/
  might show this list of links like this one:
    http://www.fruitsalad.org/kolab/server/development/current/
    http://www.erfrakon.de/mirrors/ftp.kolab.org/server/development/current/
    http://ftp.belnet.be/packages/kolab/server/development/current/
    ftp://ftp.belnet.be/packages/kolab/server/development/current/

  The current mirrors.html can be replaced with a redirect to that.

  The main use for this is to have *one* link that can be used in
  documentation, announcements, bookmarks, etc.

  "download" is a horrible long word (at least compared to "ftp"),
  so suggestions for a shorter and still not misleading name are
  very welcome. Maybe something like "files" or "get"?

  Or should this be an own hostname like download.kolab.org, so
  another host (e.g. one the mirrors) might become the master http
  and ftp download server in the future without changing the URL
  again? But I think this would only clutter the kolab.org DNS name
  space with something that isn't worth its own hostname, because in
  reality it is only one web page.

- ftp:// and http://ftp.kolab.org/kolab/ will only contain a README
  describing where to get the Kolab files now, nothing else.
  Optionally there can be a redirect to the new /download/ area, but
  as this only works with http, this needs discussion on this list.

- rsync access will no longer be possible with the old URL
  rsync://rsync.kolab.org/ftp/kolab/ (which then contains the README
  mentioned above), but only with rsync://rsync.kolab.org/kolab/
  The new URL is already working!

  Dear mirror admins, please change your mirroring scripts to use
  the new URL rsync://rsync.kolab.org/kolab/ at the next
  opportunity. But you don't need to hurry, because the old URL will
  continue to work until a final decision is made.

Regards,
Thomas

-- 
Email: thomas at intevation.de
http://intevation.de/~thomas/
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