Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] autoredirect for savannah downloads

[Sylvain Beucler]

Hi,

On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 11:49:38AM -0500, Karl Berry wrote:
> Randy Kobes in Winnipeg has set up autoredirection services for GNU,
> CPAN, and CTAN.  That is, a generic url that automatically redirects to
> a "nearby" mirror -- e.g., http://ftpmirror.gnu.org, http://mirror.ctan.org.
> 
> I expect he would be happy to do the same for the non-GNU savannah
> downloads, now that we have several mirrors
> (http://dl.sv.nongnu.org/releases/00_MIRRORS.html).
> 
> Would having this be of interest?

Great!

Can you give more information - I'm puzzled about the word
"service". Does this mean we rely on something external to Savannah?
Do we have the source code for it?

> If yes ... for it to work, we would have to install mirmon
> (http://people.cs.uu.nl/henkp/mirmon/) -- that's how Randy's service can
> know which mirrors are up to date.  Mirmon itself is a Perl script that
> is no particular problem to install.  However, since I've never
> installed anything on savannah before, I'd need some guidance to do it.
> E.g., do I just enter the vserver frontend and then do a "normal"
> install in /usr/local?  Or are there other conventions that should be
> followed?

I'd install it in 'download' rather than 'frontend' (as it is related
to the download area). It's preferrable to have a Debian package if
one is available, so we'll never forget it's installed. If not we can
install it in '/usr/local/' indeed and upgrade it from time to
time. (cf. http://savannah.gnu.org/maintenance/ManuallyInstalledPackages). Then
it's good to document the installation in /root/infra/download.txt.

Cheers!

-- 
Sylvain