One week later

It's been over a week since I publicly announced the Debian mirrors redirector.
It was covered in several places, including Linux Magazin and mentioned in the latest Debian Project News.

Thanks to all that, and quite a number of early testers of the wheezy image for the Raspberry Pi, http.debian.net has processed over one million requests from APT clients alone. This figure doesn't count users of apt-cacher/apt-cacher-ng/approx, or those who happen to be mirroring Debian with wget. Oh, and this is only the number of requests since last Sunday, when the logs were rotated.

By the way, if you are going to Debconf12 in Nicaragua, why don't you give http.debian.net a try and forget about switching mirrors?

I'm happy to see how it was welcomed and the many emails, blog comments, IRC messages, and other sorts of messages I've received about it. There are surely some rough edges but the service is still under development and all the feedback helps.

In some cases there appear to be some confusion as to how exactly it chooses the mirrors and why sometimes some mirrors are not used. I'll try to cover some of those topics in this blog, hoping the

P.S. If you've sent me an email about http.d.n and I haven't replied, please rest assured I try to take a quick look at them but I can't reply to every single message fast enough.

Thanks to everyone!

Introducing http.debian.net, Debian's mirrors redirector

You've been there: you are about to install a package, upgrade, or get the source package, and the mirror fails. It is offline, it is out of date, etc. Whatever the reason, you couldn't do it.

That's only one of the issues that http.debian.net attempts to address. In a nutshell: it works as an http-only content distribution network. It uses the network and geographic location to select the best online and up-to-date mirrors.

APT's sources.list one liner:

deb http://http.debian.net/debian stable main

Use /debian-backports for backports, and /debian-archive for archive.debian.org.

Originally introduced to the Debian mirrors community back in January, the code on the server and client sides has improved since. All is needed is squeeze's APT (or aptitude), but wheezy's and sid's will perform better.

Advantages and more details are discussed at the Debian mirrors redirector's website.

(Thanks to the early testers, everyone who has provided feedback, my friends at PuffinHost, and all the mirrors-related people, obviously including those who sponsor them!)

Not your gsoc project

Thanks to Google, for some years now there has been the so-called Google Summer of Code programme. Quite an interesting project it is.

However, how many of the slots assigned to Debian have resulted in successful projects? how many of them were actually completed by the student and not by the mentor or somebody else? are those projects in fact used or useful at all?

All these questions occurred to me while wondering what would have happened if Joey Hess' git-annex-related kickstarter project had instead been a GSOC project. His kickstart was very successful by the way. Joey: many congratulations!

Not trying to point my finger to the (IMHO many) failed or unsuccessful Debian-related gsoc projects, but I wonder how many successful projects are developed outside the get-paid-in-exchange model. I suspect most, at least in Debian.

What's done for those who actually "deliver" while working on projects as a hobby? is it really worth having GSOC slots for Debian?

Deferring the execution of a command

More than once, I have found myself running a program that calls a given script multiple times, and sometimes, way too many times. In some cases, for instance, it was only necessary to run the script once in one minute, instead of hundreds of times.
Sounds like I want something like dpkg's deferred triggers, right? pretty much so.

With this need, deferred-run was born. Example:

$ deferred-run -l lock -- echo hello world
$ deferred-run -l lock -- echo hello world
$ sleep 3
$ deferred-run -l lock -- echo hello world
[some seconds later...]
hello world

In spite of multiple calls, echo was only called once.
Best part, it only requires sh and flock.

If you are interested in shell trickery, you should take a look at its code.