Re: SJTUG's Guix mirror is online now

[Peng Mei Yu]

Hi,

Ludovic Courtès writes:

> Peng Mei Yu <pengmeiyu@riseup.net> skribis:
>
>> After extensive cooperation with SJTUG's maintainers, we are happy to
>> announce that SJTUG's Guix mirror is online now.
>>
>> The substitute URL is: https://mirrors.sjtug.sjtu.edu.cn/guix
>
> This is great news!
>
>> Asia residents, especially China residents, will greatly benefit from
>> this mirror.  Average download speed is about 3MB/s within China, which
>> is a 100 times increase compared to ci.guix.gnu.org.
>>
>> SJTUG's Guix mirror is maintained by students of Shanghai Jiao Tong
>> University Linux User Group (SJTUG).  We will continue to cooperate with
>> them in the near future to ensure this mirror server is fast and stable.
>
> So you are rsync’ing from ci, right?  Is the mirror running ‘guix
> publish’ to cope with the “weird” file layout in
> /var/cache/guix/publish?

No.  To deal with software repositories that are not easy to have a full
sync, maintainers of SJTUG wrote a cache program.  When an HTTP request
comes, the program tries to find the requested resource from an S3-like
storage server.  If the resource is found on the storage server, return
an HTTP 302 redirection to storage server.  Otherwise, return an HTTP
302 redirection to upstream server and fetch the resource from upstream
and store it into the storage server.  As I said earlier, this does not
work well for Guix because Guix client does not handle HTTP 302
redirection correctly.  So we tweaked the program a little bit to offer
transparent proxy to Guix client.  The program is here:
https://github.com/sjtug/mirror-intel

By the way, I am still waiting for the rsync account of our CI server.
If rsync is offered, we may pull guix-publish' cache and write another
program to feed the mirror with a full sync.

> If you’re interested, you could write an article for the blog post (in
> English, but it’d be a good opportunity to start translating the web
> site into Chinese :-)) about your setup and the choices you made.

I don't think there are enough things to write in a blog post but I will
consider translating the web site.


--
Peng Mei Yu