Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: Automatic archive discovery, take 1

[Andrew Suffield]

On Sun, Dec 14, 2003 at 04:16:15PM -0800, Tom Lord wrote:
>     > From: Robert Collins <address@hidden>
> 
>     > On Mon, 2003-12-15 at 09:47, Miles Bader wrote:
>     > > Anyway I have no idea why it's a hard problem, surely a `meta archive'
>     > > such as you propose could be a simple text file reached by the
>     > > meta-archive url, which could have a list of real archives and their
>     > > URLs.  This shouldn't place any restriction at all on the URLs of the
>     > > real archives.
> 
>     > Such a text file is precisely what asuffields proposal entails.
> 
> The thing I don't like about asuffield's proposal is that it provides
> auto-registration-on-demand based only on archive name and taking as
> authoritative a list of name->location mappings that has no obvious
> connection to the archive's owner.  There's nothing right about that.
> 
> I think it aimed to make a kind of built-in-rdist but instead hit the
> target of poorly-designed-name-authority-for-archives.

Careful, it's deliberately non-authoritative (unlike, say, DNS);
everything stems from the root archive list in the user's ~, and is
trivially overridden.

In more practical terms, I can think of no way to take an archive name
and figure out the owner, short of consulting an arbitrary list. They
just don't embed anything else that's useful. Certainly a system like
DNS is useless here. What I've thrown together isn't great, but it's
simple and works and easy to extend; I figure it's as good a starting
point as any (in the same sense that /etc/hosts is a good starting
point for host resolution). Better ideas are invited.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
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