http://gcc.gnu.org/mirrors.html

http://gcc.gnu.org/mirrors.html

[Matthew Langford]

What's up with this page?  It lists only one US mirror, which is
constantly full.  Wait, there are 3 Polish mirrors and only one US link?
Can't you at least list three?  Aren't there a bunch of sunsite mirrors?
Why aren't they listed?


--
MattLangford 

Re: http://gcc.gnu.org/mirrors.html

[Gerald Pfeifer]

On Thu, 6 Dec 2001, Matthew Langford wrote:
> What's up with this page?

I'm not a native speaker, but which part of "Please let us know if you
are mirroring the GCC pages so we can note it here!" was unclear to you?

We only list those mirror sites that inform us that they want to be
listed.

(I'll happily apply a patch of yours to improve the wording on that
page. Really!)

Gerald
-- 
Gerald "Jerry" pfeifer@dbai.tuwien.ac.at http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/~pfeifer/

Re: http://gcc.gnu.org/mirrors.html

[Matthew Langford]

On Fri, 7 Dec 2001, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:

> On Thu, 6 Dec 2001, Matthew Langford wrote:
> > What's up with this page?
> 
> I'm not a native speaker, but which part of "Please let us know if you
> are mirroring the GCC pages so we can note it here!" was unclear to you?
> 
> We only list those mirror sites that inform us that they want to be
> listed.

Do these sites have to mirror all the GCC pages or just the release
directories?  If all, why?  It seems to me you have a problem getting
people to mirror GCC.  And yet, as I mentioned, there must be a gazillion
GNU mirror sites.  You _know_ they are mirroring, and they are mirroring a
gzipped release of your software.  Why not mention _them_ on your
downloads page? It's all about _downloads_ and not total site mirroring.  
As long you make sure the GNU site is kept semi-constantly up to date, a
mirror of GNU is a mirror of you.

You are making people come to you, like it's a special privilege to mirror
GCC, instead of looking to list already available mirrors, so people can
get your software and make things happen.

> (I'll happily apply a patch of yours to improve the wording on that
> page. Really!)

Okay, pseudo-patch:  stick in a link to http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html,
saying these sites may be slightly slower to update, but are preferrable
to a trans-oceanic link.  And then set cron jobs to make sure the GNU ftp
sites are mirroring at least the latest stable release.


--
MattLangford 

Re: http://gcc.gnu.org/mirrors.html

[Phil Edwards]

Matthew Langford wrote:
> Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
> > We only list those mirror sites that inform us that they want to be
> > listed.
> 
> Do these sites have to mirror all the GCC pages or just the release
> directories?

Sites can mirror whatever subset of stuff they want to mirror.  It's their
diskspace, after all.


> You _know_ they are mirroring, and they are mirroring a
> gzipped release of your software.  Why not mention _them_ on your
> downloads page?

Maybe they don't want the entire world downloading from them.

People choose to mirror software for reasons /other/ than making it
available to everyone else out there.  I used to mirror a subset of the
Linux kernel patches repository, but it was for me and my colleagues
in the same building, not for the rest of the planet.  Listing me as a
"mirror site" would have been harmful, not helpful.


> You are making people come to you, like it's a special privilege to mirror
> GCC,

In a way it is:  known mirror sites are allowed to bypass some (all?) of
the connection limits on the FTP server.


Phil

-- 
If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater
than the animating contest for freedom, go home and leave us in peace.  We seek
not your counsel, nor your arms.  Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you;
and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.            - Samuel Adams

Re: http://gcc.gnu.org/mirrors.html

[Matthew Langford]

On Wed, 12 Dec 2001, Phil Edwards wrote:

> Matthew Langford wrote:
> > You _know_ they are mirroring, and they are mirroring a
> > gzipped release of your software.  Why not mention _them_ on your
> > downloads page?
> 
> Maybe they don't want the entire world downloading from them.
> 
> People choose to mirror software for reasons /other/ than making it
> available to everyone else out there.  I used to mirror a subset of the
> Linux kernel patches repository, but it was for me and my colleagues
> in the same building, not for the rest of the planet.  Listing me as a
> "mirror site" would have been harmful, not helpful.

"They" was a reference to public sites mirroring GNU.  They are already
listed on the GNU mirror web page.  This is a superset of GCC.  If they
are willing to be listed to the world as carrying the entire GNU software
universe (which includes the GCC stuff), they are already mirroring the
main part, the Download, of your distribution.  It would be helpful to
visitors to mention there are alternatives to the very few listed on your
web page.  Or perhaps you like everyone in the US and Canada tagging the
network connections of the poor saps who walked to your ivory tower
and volunteered their mirrors?  

The link to the actual gcc.org download is spelled out but not an active
link.  I suppose this is to strongly encourage people to use the mirrors.
But then, you don't have many mirrors listed:  one for the North American
continent, two for South America, and one for Australia, from what I saw. 
 Oh well, yank it from another continent.


> > You are making people come to you, like it's a special privilege to mirror
> > GCC,
> 
> In a way it is:  known mirror sites are allowed to bypass some (all?) of
> the connection limits on the FTP server.

Maybe you are looking at things completely backward.  Instead of guarding
the software, and worrying about who is coming in to steal the software
and rob your bandwidth, you could think of it as _distributing_ your
releases, and how to _put_ it on as many servers as possible.  In that
direction, making use of the existing GNU mirroring system (both by
web-mention and by update-seeding) would be most helpful, I think.  From
the first viewpoint you seem to be doing nicely; the second one, you are
adequate only for yourselves, through CVS, and Europe and Japan.



--
MattLangford 

Re: http://gcc.gnu.org/mirrors.html

[Phil Edwards]

On Wed, Dec 12, 2001 at 07:14:42PM -0600, Matthew Langford wrote:
> "They" was a reference to public sites mirroring GNU.  They are already
> listed on the GNU mirror web page.

Ah, now I see what you're saying.  Pronouns missing an antecedent are fun...

Yes, there is not as much communication between the GNU sysadmins and us
as could be hoped for.  Mostly it's nothing more than a lack of time on
the part of the volunteers at either end.  No hoarding, no ivory-tower
syndrome, just lack of time.

If you'd like to contact the sysadmins of ftp.gnu.org and ask them whether
the mirror list is up-to-date, and if it is, provide a patch to mirrors.html,
that would be a good way to contribute.


> > In a way it is:  known mirror sites are allowed to bypass some (all?) of
> > the connection limits on the FTP server.
> 
> Maybe you are looking at things completely backward.  Instead of guarding
> the software, and worrying about who is coming in to steal the software
> and rob your bandwidth,

I'll ignore the rest of your flames and just explain this:  gcc.gnu.org
is extremely overloaded.  For that reason anonymous FTP has been severely
restricted (and I think it's been disallowed completely on some of the
more popular projects).  We're trying to move anonymous CVS access off
onto another system also.  It's not about "robbing bandwidth," it's about
having some bandwidth left over so that the developers can actually check
in code changes.  :-)  Right now CVS commits of multiple files can often
get dropped partway through.  That doesn't benefit /anyone/.


Phil

-- 
If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater
than the animating contest for freedom, go home and leave us in peace.  We seek
not your counsel, nor your arms.  Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you;
and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.            - Samuel Adams

Re: http://gcc.gnu.org/mirrors.html

[Gerald Pfeifer]

On Fri, 7 Dec 2001, Matthew Langford wrote:
> And yet, as I mentioned, there must be a gazillion GNU mirror sites.
> You _know_ they are mirroring, and they are mirroring a gzipped release
> of your software.

I assume you missed the fact that
  http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-2.95/gcc-2.95.html
  http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-2.95/gcc-2.95.1.html
  http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-2.95/gcc-2.95.2.html
  http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-2.95/gcc-2.95.3.html
and
  http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-3.0/ has been
have been referring to the GNU mirror sites for years, right?

> Why not mention _them_ on your downloads page?

That's a good suggestion, and I will try to add this tomorrow. (Note,
though, that the GNU site only carries a subset of what's on gcc.gnu.org
and most of its mirrors, namely current GCC releases.)

> [...] the poor saps who walked to your ivory tower and volunteered their
> mirrors?

Please tone down. Phil is a volunteer, I am a volunteer, and most others
here are volunteers as well; no money, little honor, few thanks.

> The link to the actual gcc.org download is spelled out but not an active
> link.  I suppose this is to strongly encourage people to use the mirrors.

Right.

On Thu, 13 Dec 2001, Phil Edwards wrote:
> Mostly it's nothing more than a lack of time on the part of the
> volunteers at either end.  No hoarding, no ivory-tower syndrome, just
> lack of time.

Exactly!

> I'll ignore the rest of your flames and just explain this:  gcc.gnu.org
> is extremely overloaded.  For that reason anonymous FTP has been severely
> restricted (and I think it's been disallowed completely on some of the
> more popular projects).  We're trying to move anonymous CVS access off
> onto another system also.

Yup, and that seems to work fine now; I already have a patch and will
update the corresponding GCC page tomorrow. (Again, Matthew, also this
has been handled by volunteers exclusively.)

Gerald
-- 
Gerald "Jerry" pfeifer@dbai.tuwien.ac.at http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/~pfeifer/

Re: http://gcc.gnu.org/mirrors.html

[Phil Edwards]

On Fri, Dec 14, 2001 at 12:22:48AM +0100, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
> Please tone down. Phil is a volunteer, I am a volunteer, and most others
> here are volunteers as well; no money, little honor, few thanks.
                               ^^^^^^^^
Waitaminute.  The GCC users haven't been mailing you the monthly cheques??

Oops.


Phil

-- 
If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater
than the animating contest for freedom, go home and leave us in peace.  We seek
not your counsel, nor your arms.  Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you;
and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.            - Samuel Adams

Re: http://gcc.gnu.org/mirrors.html

[Matthew Langford]

On Fri, 14 Dec 2001, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:

> On Fri, 7 Dec 2001, Matthew Langford wrote:
> > And yet, as I mentioned, there must be a gazillion GNU mirror sites.
> > You _know_ they are mirroring, and they are mirroring a gzipped release
> > of your software.
> 
> I assume you missed the fact that
>   http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-2.95/gcc-2.95.html
>   http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-2.95/gcc-2.95.1.html
>   http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-2.95/gcc-2.95.2.html
>   http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-2.95/gcc-2.95.3.html
> and
>   http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-3.0/ has been
> have been referring to the GNU mirror sites for years, right?

I see that, and that's exactly what I was requesting, but for the Mirrors
page. Yes, I did miss that.  Problem is, I was looking at the libstdc++
page, which does not have that link.  Nor will you find it if you jump
straight to "Mirrors" to begin downloading (eg, you already know what the
latest release is, don't want to read about what it is/features it
has/bugs it fixes/all about free/open software, just want to get it to
start trying to build).  Nor, if you go to the Installation link, then to
Downloading GCC... "yeah, that's what I want!  Wha...?  It doesn't have
actual downloading information, it just tells me what I get if I were to
download at some future point.  Then I must go to the Releases page..."
and right away I see "mirror sites" and I've once again missed the link to
available North American downloads.

My thought is that for the (most?) common case of wanting to get the
latest gcc source or binaries, minimizing the number of links clicked and
reading required (ie, on the sidebar or at the top of the page) would be
nice.


> > Why not mention _them_ on your downloads page?
> 
> That's a good suggestion, and I will try to add this tomorrow. (Note,
> though, that the GNU site only carries a subset of what's on gcc.gnu.org
> and most of its mirrors, namely current GCC releases.)

Thank you.  Yes, I realize the subset bit, and would think it even proper
if you mentioned this limitation near the link.


> > [...] the poor saps who walked to your ivory tower and volunteered their
> > mirrors?
> 
> Please tone down. Phil is a volunteer, I am a volunteer, and most others
> here are volunteers as well; no money, little honor, few thanks.

I understand, and apologize, in that I probably misconstrued your
response.  If someone had pointed out the links mentioned above, I would
have been somewhat satisfied.  Instead, someone defended the fact that
downloaders were limited to a very lacking mirror list (as in lacking
enough mirrors), which is clearly sub-optimal.  And then defended against
adding to the too-small list, because it was such a privilege to have
unrestricted FTP access.  The overwhelming sense was that the gcc team
could care less if people could reach their software.  Not good.

It didn't help that after several days of trying to compile KDE for
Solaris, I realized that it used too many g++-isms and would not compile
(for me, at least) under the Sun CC compiler--some "file level access"
complaint about a struct with member functions used to instantiate a
subclassed templated class.  Yech.  It's some comfort that gcc 3.x
probably croaks at this, as well as Sun's compiler.  Then I find our gcc
had been compiled without shared libs, so I was going to have to recompile
gcc, as well as recompile a ton of other libs and add-ons (libxml,
libxslt, Qt, then kdexxx).  I wanted to get gcc 2.95.3 as quickly
as possible to get on with it.

> > I'll ignore the rest of your flames and just explain this:  gcc.gnu.org
> > is extremely overloaded.  For that reason anonymous FTP has been severely
> > restricted (and I think it's been disallowed completely on some of the
> > more popular projects).  We're trying to move anonymous CVS access off
> > onto another system also.
> 
> Yup, and that seems to work fine now; I already have a patch and will
> update the corresponding GCC page tomorrow. (Again, Matthew, also this
> has been handled by volunteers exclusively.)

Understood.  Please understand me:  for your efforts to have meaning, your
software needs to be distributed to the people who want to use it.  It is
in your best interest to work around the issues surrounding gcc.gnu.org
and the limits on gcc-specific mirrors, and provide as easy a path as
possible for obtaining your software.  That was why I took the time to
send you a note about the problem.


--
MattLangford 

Re: http://gcc.gnu.org/mirrors.html

[Gerald Pfeifer]

On Wed, 31 May 2000, Joerg Faschingbauer wrote:
> The mirror list's Austria entry [should read]
> 
> ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/gnu/gcc/

Thanks for the hint, I just updated that link.

Gerald

PS: And yes, that server is not too far away from my office. ;-)
-- 
Gerald "Jerry" pfeifer@dbai.tuwien.ac.at http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/~pfeifer/

http://gcc.gnu.org/mirrors.html

[Joerg Faschingbauer]

The mirror list's Austria entry 

ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/gnu/egcs/

does not exist. It should read

ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/gnu/gcc/

instead.

Yours,
Joerg