Re: Setup.exe: all files in one common directory? (not per-server)

[Brian Dessent <brian at dessent dot net>]

sowiso wrote:

> Yes, and that's another bad point about it!
> Different setup.ini files! What's the idea?

A single setup.ini file describes a particular view of the state of the
distro at a given point in time for a given site.  Mirrors are
inherently loosely synchronized on the order of hours, not seconds, and
it would be insane to expect any higher level of coherency.  You just
have to accept that it's possible that for example a new package was
just uploaded to the master site and that it might take 3 hours for it
to reach mirror A and 6 hours for it to reach mirror B.  If you hit
mirror A and mirror B during that window there would be a discrepancy as
to which version of that package was current.  Thus, state must be
maintained relative to each mirror, there is no such thing as global
state.

> Why not one and the same setup.ini which can be read by _any_ mirror?

There is exactly one master setup.ini on the sourceware site.  But you
cannot expect dozens of independent mirrors to always update in lock
step.  They will have their local view of what is current.

> That's exactly to prevent the left hand not knowing about what the right
> is doing or has done.

Setup reads all the .ini files in the Local Package Directory and
assembles the package state info from all of them to generate a view of
what the latest available version of each package is.

> Nice, nice ... but sometimes I also *do* want to install manually
> without setup, e. g. sources.
> And always having to use Windows search or *nix find first which mirror
> the package has been assigned to this time is not really that "cool".

Well A) you can install source packages with setup.exe.  And B) if you
want a flat layout then mirror the files yourself using any method you
want.  You can use rsync for example to sync your local site to any of
the rsync sites.  You don't have to use setup.exe at all, and you can
have your precious single setup.ini that way.  (This is what I do
personally.)  Whatever method you use to get the files onto your drive
is your own business, setup doesn't care.  All it needs a dir with one
or more setup.ini files.

Brian

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