Tools for eCos 2.0

[Jonathan Larmour <jifl@jifvik.org>]

Hi overseers,

One of the things the eCos project needs for our upcoming release are 
prebuilt GNU tools for some of our primary targets. The burden of having 
to build tools, especially for windows users, can be quite large. Our 
users are embedded developers, not GNU enthusiasts per se! Rebuilding 
toolchains isn't something we expect them to have to do, and we've had to 
spend a huge amount of time helping and supporting people who do it over 
the years.

So as part of our next major release (2.0) we are intending to integrate 
support for downloading some prebuilt toolchains... and since eCos comes 
from sources.redhat.com, so should these tools. These tools would only 
really be usable with eCos though - although built in a standard way, we 
have removed newlib which should scupper most other folk's chances of 
using them as generic tools.

However eCos is big enough already (16Mb even in .tar.bz2 form!), and 
these tools will no doubt be popular - at least one tools download per 
eCos download. So in the interests of general harmony and peace for 
everyone on s.r.c :-) we think it is best all round that there's a limit 
on the download bandwidth to act as a deterrent to using s.r.c instead of 
a mirror.

WU-FTPD supports this in /etc/ftpaccess using the throughput directive. 
It's best to apply that just to where these tools would live, probably 
/sourceware/ftp/anonftp/pub/ecos/gnutools/

I've been thinking of something like:

throughput /var/ftp /pub/ecos/gnutools/* * 8192 0.5 *

which restricts downloads to 8192 bytes/sec for the first tools download, 
and half that each time for each subsequent one. Given that tools sizes 
are about 10-15Mb, that seems like about the maximum level of pain ;-), 
although if people didn't mind a higher byterate, obviously we wouldn't 
mind! We only expect people to download one tool in general of course.

The only slightly annoying thing is that you can't stop it applying to 
mirrors as well, without a lengthy field at the end - it doesn't use the 
classes :-|. That's probably not that much of a problem though - we intend 
these files to change very infrequently.

Out of interest, right now we're looking at 5 toolchains for Linux and 
Windows, giving a grand total of 116Mb, which is a fair whack of FTP space 
too, but we don't really expect this to grow much at least.

Anyway, I just wanted to run this by overseers to check for any comments. 
Obviously if people think this is overkill and just allowing unrestricted 
downloads would be fine, then we're not going to object :-).

Jifl
-- 
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