From owner-freebsd-www Mon Apr 14 07:11:04 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id HAA15964 for www-outgoing; Mon, 14 Apr 1997 07:11:04 -0700 (PDT) Received: from fallout.campusview.indiana.edu (fallout.campusview.indiana.edu [149.159.1.1]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA15959 for ; Mon, 14 Apr 1997 07:11:00 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (jfieber@localhost) by fallout.campusview.indiana.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id JAA07405; Mon, 14 Apr 1997 09:10:52 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 14 Apr 1997 09:10:52 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" cc: Martin Cracauer , www@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Comments on new search page.. In-Reply-To: <3991.861022799@time.cdrom.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-www@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Mon, 14 Apr 1997, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > to black magic. I can't imagine a better use of John Fieber's (or Ade > Barkah's) extremely limited spare time than to spec out and develop a > "mirror kit" with full instructions and all the bits you need for > becoming a "full" FreeBSD www mirror. Without that, we're screwed and > won't ever advance beyond the current state of the art. Before raising the bar, we should survey the mirrors and figure out how far the bar can be raised before too many drop out. For example, with the mailing list archives approaching 700 megabytes, I'm sure mirroring those would kill off almost all! Also to be considered is shifting from distributing the built pages, to distributing the web source and having mirrors build on site. This would make it easier to make local variations, such as the "about this server" page, primary ftp site used and the like. To do this, the web source needs to be more self contained. Currently, as Paul Richards recently reminded me, building it depends on thing neither in FreeBSD or the web tree. It also depends on having access to a cvs repository to get at the handbook, faq and (currently) the index file from the ports collection. Generally, the build procedure has a lot of rough edges to be smoothed. Since I built the build procedure, I take full credit for those edges. It was my first attempt at crafting a build procedure emulating the slick one used for the rest of the FreeBSD system. I've definately got a bit to learn! Another important thing is to keep web and ftp mirrors in sync such that a web mirror can reliably point to its corresponding ftp mirror, rather than pointing to wcarchive. About improving the ports interface, a lot could be done easier and cleaner (from the user perspective) if we just served the ports collection direct from the web server rather than linking to wcarchive. What sort of a load would this generate? Are wcarchive stats for ports handy? -john