From: "Kelson Vibber" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> At 12:46 AM 7/20/2004, Duncan Hill wrote:
> >Gentoo's portage has a neat feature that may work for the ratelimiting
for
> >the
> >rulesets. When emerge sync is run, a single small file is retrieved
(couple
> >of bytes if I remember right), and this file is apparently compared to
the
> >on-disk copy. If the contents are different (I think the file has a unix
> >timestamp in it), the full sync occurs, updating the portage tree with
> >rsync.
> >If the contents are the same, the sync exits cleanly.
>
> HTTP (which RDJ currently uses) already has a mechanism for this. The
> client can send an If-Modified-Since header, or compare an Etag from its
> cache, and the server will check, say "no, this file hasn't changed since
> you last downloaded it," and issue a "304 Not Modified" response
consisting
> of only an HTTP header and no data. Just about every browser in existence
> uses this method to determine that it can load a file from its cache.
>
> If RDJ is updated to handle this, as Chris(?) suggested, half the problem
> is solved. Even people downloading every two minutes are only grabbing a
> few dozen bytes of headers instead of several K of data.
Out of idle adlepated curiosity why is RDJ using HTTP instead of
FTP with wget? The little script I put together to grab new rules
simplifies matters by using '/usr/bin/wget -r -l 1 -nd -N "$source$file"'.
I never fetch what I don't need. It works like a champ.
{^_^}
