A few notes: Using rsync does not help the following problem: I have four favorite mirrors, plus a "private" setup-compatible website from my friend Bob. setup.exe will show me a merged view of the contents of all of those sites, insuring that I get the latest version of a package wherever it is found. By merging in the "private" site, setup enables me to get my friend Bob's latest version of "King of Frobozz, Tyrant" game using the same setup tool/view, along with the latest apache package or binutils package from the "official" cygwin mirrors.
rsync can't merge. I could rsync each of the four mirrors down to my machine into separate directories (assuming the mirrors all had anonymous rsync servers), and rsync Bob's private website (assuming his webhost provided rsync -- hah!). But even then, setup can't merge multiple local directories, at least not right now. So, we still need some variant of setup.exe that can merge multiple setup-compatible sites, and "mirror" only the latest stuff into a single local "release" tree / setup.ini. Also, rsync does some stuff we don't really care about: since most of the files are compressed, rsync's sophisticated "download changed chunks" algorithm is pretty useless. In compressed files, the first byte that is different in the uncompressed file will cause a cascade of changes throughout the remainder of the compressed file. So: 1 byte diff in uncompressed file == entire compressed file is different. OTOH, since we typically (never?) upload a modified version of a given file USING THE SAME NAME, we don't really care too much about this. "Our" mirroring tool can just use the md5 hashes on the mirror and locally to determine the rare instance when a given file has had its contents changed -- but then we'd download the ENTIRE file, not "changed chunks". (However, if this ever happens, isn't it a sign that something went wrong somewhere?) Also, there's really no need to use rsync's compression engine, since most of the data to be transferred has already been compressed. Finally, the local "setup.ini" will never(?) match the setup.ini at any one of the mirrors or private sites; it will be a merger of them. So, rsync can't do that. So, if someone cares enough to do the work, there is still a need for the "additional tool" that uses the setup.exe codebase to do "cygwin-specific distributed mirroring". See my earlier rant. But, the rsync method should enable folks with slow connections to limp along for a while...without trying to turn setup.exe ITSELF into a mirror tool. --Chuck -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/