Hi all,

I'm happy to announce that we have a public, read-only Squeaksource mirror up 
and running at the Universidad de Chile. The URL is: 
http://www.dsal.cl/squeaksource/ TECHNICAL DETAILS BELOW. Feel free to 
broadcast this announcement!

MOTIVATION:
For us, Switzerland is a long way and the connection to Squeaksource has always 
been painfully slow. We've set up this mirror to help to address this, and I 
imagine that it will be of use not only for the Chileans but also other 
countries in latin america, which is why I am announcing it here.

ITS TRANSPARENT:
I've worked out a way to make the use of this mirror transparent when using 
Pharo 1.3: you just use monticello as always, and have a setting to redirect 
loads from Squeaksource to wherever you want. I have successfully loaded Moose 
and Seaside from the mirror using this package, so it should work for you. And 
I can tell you, it was blazingly fast: Seaside loaded in 5m45, and most of the 
time was spent compiling ... ;-)

So try the mirror and the package out, send me your comments, we want to work 
on this to make Squeaksource a better experience for everybody.

HOW TO USE from Pharo 1.3:
- Get the redirection package from 
http://www.squeaksource.com/MonticelloRedirect
- To load from the mirror instead of from Squeaksource, do-it of the following:
MRManager redirectFrom: 'http://www.squeaksource.com/' to: 
'http://www.dsal.cl/squeaksource/'.
- To remove this redirection: MRManager removeFrom: 
'http://www.squeaksource.com/'.
- See comments of MRManager for more info. MRManager list can be useful at some 
times.
- Only 2 classes, < 10 methods, not counting accessors. The trick is the use of 
MethodWrappers.
- I did not test this in Squeak or other versions of Pharo. Feel free to try it 
out in your environment and send me patches if needed.
- There is no UI, contributions are welcome!!

DETAILS ON THE MIRROR
- It's a full copy of Squeaksource, updated daily.
- The mirror is read-only: if you want to make a commit you still have to do it 
in Squeaksource. This is to avoid all the complications of distributed writes.
- Updates happen once a day, before midnight Chilean time. Updates take 
typically (up till now) 200 minutes (!), average download speed here is 200KB/s 
:-(
- The Squeaksource team has been so kind as to provide a list of the packages 
that are in Squeaksource, refreshed daily and we pass this to wget (with some 
massaging of the data inbetween).
- The Squeaksource list of packages is available here: 
http://scg.unibe.ch/download/SSProjectList/projectList.txt
- The software that does the mirror is available here: 
https://github.com/vramiro/easy-wget-mirror

MANY THANKS TO:
- Daniel Galdames for doing the original mirroring tests
- Victor Ramiro for taking Daniels' work and putting it in production
- The Squeaksource team for providing the daily list of packages, especially 
Fabrizio Perin and Mircea Lungu
- You for trying it out and telling us about it!

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Johan Fabry   
[email protected] - http://dcc.uchile.cl/~jfabry
PLEIAD Lab - Computer Science Department (DCC) - University of Chile







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