so, for me this is quite fine, because i believe to know what was happening and i solved the problem for me. for unexperienced user this could a reason to not to use fink any more, because it could be frustrating. sure, noone forces them to use unstable, but who is not using the latest version of the software on a desktop system?
It's possible, though it seems like most people post to the mailing list--which means that the problem gets known.
yep, thats correct. but this requires the user either to subscribe to a mailing list or to register at SF to report a bug. both a really huge burden for average mac os users. i think that they are a little bit lazy. :)
and even in the case that the user is using stable, there is same problem (you have mentioned it at the beginning of the mail). this means that fink and the packagers relies on the feedback of users, if a package does no longer exist (huh, user feed back, is this really working?). i mean, one way to improve the confidence of normal users into fink is to ensure that at least the stable tree is consistent.
Every so often somebody does a check by running "fink fetch-all", which tries to download every package. This could be done more regularly--it's tedious, though, because I think there's about 1000 packages in the stable tree, and twice that in unstable.
i have tried a different approach which does not download all the packages, because just checking for the existence of the file on the mirror is enough.
i created a list of downloadable files with the help of fetch-all and the dryrun option which prints a list of urls. i always took the first url in the list (dryrun prints the name of the package, checksum and a list of download locations) and checked with a HEAD command (curl supports this, option -I ) and in combination with a proxy the existence for file. this brought up some non-working locations (503, 404, and time outs occured).
so, this produces a not so high traffic (eg 5kb/package, which means about 15meg for unstable with about 3000 packages) and also, sorting the files by server allows curl to combine requests to the same server and reduces the cost of connection-setup.
cu, gottfried
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