The recent thread... handling new releases

[Marcel Moolenaar]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2003 at 05:18:21PM -0400, Ken Smith wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 12, 2003 at 02:59:55PM -0400, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
> 
> > I have wondered if cvsup could be smart enough to download files
> > under one name, and then afterwards (on a later run) know to just
> > rename that file to the official name for a public release.
> 
> This is an "I don't know but can look into it".  Even if the answer is
> "Yes" though, it might be more important to focus on what motivated
> the question.

Yes. Once you know what you want to achieve (and why) it's easier to
come up with mechanisms that do it.

> With some research
> maybe a mechanism that accomplishes the goal can be found that would
> work for more transfer mechanisms (not sure what right now, but playing
> games with hard links type thing maybe).

Maybe split the problem space into 2 parts:

1. The actual data and the mechanisms for distributing it. Typical
   characteristics here are bandwidth consumption, transport delays
   and disk space usage.
2. The meta-data that describes the data and controls access. Small
   pieces of information you can more easily distribute to all
   mirrors at once and can be used to set/change mods, rename/move
   files, locking/unlocking directories, checksums, download statistics
   and the likes.

Just a brainwave. Use anyway you want...

-- 
 Marcel Moolenaar	  USPA: A-39004		 marcel at xcllnt.net