Re: FTP Mirrors (was Re: Rewriting the website)

Hi,

On Wed, 14 Jan 2004, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

> I think the directory structure should mirror exactly
> ftp.postgresql.org, so I can go to ftp.xx.postgresql.org and find the
> same things in the same places. If someone wants to mirror with
> arbitrary directory structure, they can do that, but since you're going
> to have to go through the web page anyway they don't have to carry the
> postgresql.org domain at all.

> Right now, virtually no mirrors follow that rule. Is it so hard to set
> up virtual hosts on ftp servers?

Regardless of virtualhosts, I think that ftp.postgresql.org's own
FTP server should be structured like /pub/PostgreSQL/v7.4.1... That's how
our mirror is setup and I believe that's the cleanest way to have more
than one mirror in the same server. This is also a good practice, since
not all (including ours) ftp daemons support virtual hosts.

If we had all directories directly after /pub, there would be more
than 30 subdirectories, all mixed up: NetBSD, PostgreSQL, etc. Thus,
setting our mirror just like PostgreSQL's, without virtualhost, would be
very confusing for our clients.

I agree that every mirror should use the same directory structure,
but asking everyone to place everything directly after /pub or setting up
virtualhosts doesn't seem to be plausible, mainly because there're a lot
of mirrors out there.

So I think that the easiest (and cleanest) way is to change
postgresql's ftp to /pub/postgresql, asking new and current mirrors to
adopt that approach. It's much easier than asking for virtualhosts. Not
just because I wouldn't have to change my setup :) but also because many
projects with mirrors do that successfully.
Or, at least a /pub/postgresql link to the actual mirror directory
could be used...

[]s
Ricardo.