Re: Using a CDN or some other mirror?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Hartmut,

Hartmut Goebel <address@hidden> skribis:

> One could get in touch with the administrators of some of the mirrors
> used by other distributions. [1] has a list of Mirrors for Fedora,
> including location and bandwidth. [2] is a list of mirrors used by the
> community driven distribution Mageia, additionally including the
> "upstream" - which might help prioritizing.

It’s tempting to follow the lead of traditional distros when it comes to
mirroring.

However, Guix is very different from these: on the build farm, we build
several new store items per minute, and we aim to distribute them to our
users.  This is quite different from distros that upload .deb, .rpm,
etc. files much less frequently.  Their mirroring process is thus fairly
similar to good ol’ synchronization over rsync and the like.

For Guix I think a caching proxy and a CDN kind of model is a better
fit: it’s good fit for the publication rate of store items, and a good
fit for ‘guix publish’ which uses HTTP.  Furthermore, the build farm
doesn’t expose anything like rsync, which makes it hard to imagine a
“traditional” mirroring process.

WDYT?

Thanks,
Ludo’.