State of the archive

[Kevin E Martin]

On Sat, Apr 29, 2006 at 10:56:11PM +0300, Daniel Stone wrote:
> My proposal is simple: have an rsync job mirroring
> xorg.freedesktop.org::xorg-archive to ftp.x.org.  This would remove the
> ugly dichotomy that exists between xorg.freedesktop.org and x.org in
> terms of releases.

In general, I think rsyncing the archive from xorg.freedesktop.org to
ftp.x.org and limiting write access for the archive to the same people
who have commit access as Daniel suggests is fine, but with a few
caveats about the archive that I'll explain below.

There are several things in the archive on annarchy that I'd like to see
cleaned up before we start mirroring:

- There are subdirs in individual/* where there shouldn't be.  For
  example, individual/app/xdpyinfo/ and individual/proto/Randr/.  I
  posted a message about this to the list a while back listing the files
  from these subdirs and noting that they could be deleted.
- The individual/xc dir shouldn't exist.
- X11R6.8.1-save should not be in the archive -- it was a temporarily
  saved version of an aborted release that was never deleted.
- Release candidates are useful during development but should not be
  pushed to FTP mirrors.  This could be solved either by adding a new
  dir named "archive/development" for the RCs, which is never mirrored
  to ftp.x.org, or we could create a new "development" archive where RCs
  could be placed (e.g., /srv/xorg.freedesktop.org/development).
- The X11R7.0 dir is meant for officially branded packages (i.e., those
  with the release version in the name) while the individual dir is
  meant for the unbranded packages.  Unfortunately, the unbranded
  packages were accidentally put into the X11R7.0 dir as well as the
  individual dir.  They should be removed from the X11R7.0 branded dir.
- Older releases should be read-only so that they cannot accidentally be
  overwritten --  note that some are already read-only but not all.

Since we're cleaning, there are also a few issues with the archive on
ftp.x.org, which I'd like to see cleaned up on annarchy before we start
mirroring:

- The dir names are inconsistent and can be made uniform.  For example,
  10R3 becomes X10R3, R4 becomes X11R4, etc.  It seems that most of this
  has already been done on annarchy, but I think we might also be able
  to remove the old names.
- Contrib.howto is grossly out of date and should be removed.
- The DOCS dir is not mirrored on annarchy, but it appears to be quite
  old info and probably could be moved to an "OLD" dir.  Not sure if we
  want to call the dir "OLD" or something else.  Any suggestions?
- The unsupported dir is also quite old but some people might find the
  files there useful.  Also a candidate for moving to an "OLD" dir.
- The top level / files are out-of-date and could be cleaned up.

Note these changes will cause quite a bit of traffic for the mirrors, so
I'd like to make sure we're happy with the changes and then make them
once.  After everything is ready to go and tested, we can enable rsync
mirror.  I expect this will probably take a short while to complete, but
hopefully not too long.  I'm happy to help with the clean up.

In the mean time, I suggest that the current security patch for 6.9/7.0
be copied to ftp.x.org, which should address the immediate concern about
the missing security fix.  Also, any other fixes that are missing can be
handled similarly as needed until the archive on annarchy is ready and
the mirror is running.

Kevin