Francis Lalonde wrote: >> I'm uncertain as to what you mean by "mirror update >> server mechanism". We do support content mirrors (that is, mirrors of >> the package data itself). However, no individuals, to my knowledge, >> have opted to provide public mirrors (outside of china): >> >> http://opensolaris.org/os/project/pkg/Mirroring/ > > Ok, I'll try that. Unfortunately, the only servers I have control over have > too little bandwidth for public use, and I expect the amount of paperwork > required to officialize a mirror within my organization would be > overwhelming. It is surprising that no public institution has devoted > resources to one, since they have no problem supporting even the most obscure > Linux distro.
The main reason is that, currently, running a content mirror requires that your run a pkg.depotd server. This was in part due to limitations of the Python transport libraries we were using, and for other reasons. However, in the near future, we hope to re-architect things a bit so that content mirrors (package data only) will be able to just use any http server, and possibly ftp, or nfs :) >> At this time, pkg(5) does not support using file-based sources for >> packaging operations. An on-disk format will very >> likely be implemented later this year. >> >> However, I can tell you that there are plans to >> release an ISO image of the 2009.06 repository soon so that you can run a >> local depot server and use that as a mirror. > > This ISO will probably go a long way toward fixing the current distribution > infrastructure weaknesses, and if it comes with an embedded IPS server > startup script, I think it would also remove the necessity for an on-disk > format. Or maybe pkg itself could have a local-update mode which would start > a temporary IPS server to read from a disk repo. There are no plans for an embedded startup script, as all of the components you need for a local mirror are already installed on a 2009.06 system. However, there will be fairly simple instructions for setup available. I will warn you that the total download will be around 6.6GB just for a mirror of the 2009.06 release content. Cheers, -- Shawn Walker
