Hi folks. It may not seem like it, but the apache.org developers are fairly aware that we've busted mirroring in a bad way with our split into vhosts. Fixing that completely (moving all content to be under a single mirrorable www.apache.org) is still being discussed, with some good reasons not to do it (namely, that there may be publishing processes that are incompatible with that, or that there may be content/builds/etc that asking the mirror sites to take would be too much).
While that's being discussed, what's not as controversial is the idea of focusing for the time being http://www.apache.org/dist/, and especially to make it non-project-specific and non-httpd-specific. We'd thus be rearranging it to look something like /dist/codebase/[binaries|*] where under dist each project's codebases would have their own subdirectory (e.g. /dist/xerces/), into which anything specific to that codebase could be placed. The only further standard beyond that would be that platform-specific binaries would be in a subdir called "binaries" that would contain subdirs for each platform the codebase has been compiled for. Java .jar files, since they're not platform-specific (in theory, heh) would be in the top file. One alternative that's been proposed is /dist/project/codebase/, i.e. /dist/xml/xerces/ instead of just /dist/xerces/. I prefer a flatter namespace for aesthetic reasons, but someone suggested that architecting it this way allowed for someone to selectively mirror by project. Speak up now if you think sorting by project would be preferable. Care would be taken to make sure that only the most recent versions of any particular branch of the code line would be there, as well as only the most recent binary builds. E.g, today, under /dist/httpd-2.0/, we'd have apache-2.0a9, and *perhaps* 2.0a8, but older ones would be shuffled off to httpd.apache.org/dist/ and perhaps further under a /dist/old or something. This is to try and keep low the total amount of disk space needed to mirror the apache.org distributables. Thoughts? Comments? If we get a positive indication from this list, I'll proceed to create the appropriate dirs and contact the codebase owners to make the move. Brian
