9 May
2021
9 May
'21
4:44 p.m.
On Sat, May 08, 2021 at 09:04:19PM +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
Yep.
Done.
Yes.
Right ;-) Please make any corrections necessary.
Hello,
On Sat, May 08, 2021 at 06:04:44PM +0100, Adam Spiers wrote:
Added to the wiki.
On Sat, May 08, 2021 at 09:15:46AM +0000, Andy
Smith wrote:
Debian's instructions are probably that way because they don't know
what country the viewer may be in, so directs people to a geo-ip
redirector. All Debian mirrors are meant to carry the same stuff so
anything you can get from deb.debian.org you should also be able to
get from ftp.uk.debian.org or ftp.de.debian.org and so on. The reason why "deb.debian.org"
isn't in the list is because that mirror
is a geo-ip thing that redirects to what it thinks is the nearest fastly
CDN node. It's mainly used for giving out to people when you don't know
where in the world they are so giving them a geographical mirror would
not be appropriate. Also for mobile users, for example.
Doesn't make a lot of sense for things permanently located in London,
which is why the default setting is "ftp.uk.debian.org".
OK. IMHO the problem seems to be a combination of the following:
- https://backports.debian.org/Instructions/ only mentions
deb.debian.org, and says nothing about alternative mirrors. -
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Apt-cacher#Available_mirrors doesn't
mention deb.debian.org, and even though backports.debian.org is
listed, it doesn't explain how to derive a source correctly pointing
to a Bitfolk mirror of backports.
Once you know that ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ can be used any place
that deb.debian.org/debian/ is mentioned then hopefully you can see
that what you wanted was:
deb http://apt-cacher.lon.bitfolk.com/debian/ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/
buster-backports main Please do edit the article in a way that you think
would make that
obvious to anyone in future!
Done.
Prior to
emailing the list, I tried several combinations of hosts and paths
before giving up and just using deb.debian.org.
The other thing the article should make clear, but obviously
doesn't, is that if you try to use anything that's not in the list
of "available mirrors" then it won't work, and you should just use
it directly.
So even if someone did not spot that they could use
"ftp.uk.debian.org" instead of "deb.debian.org", I would have hoped
that they would then think, "oh, it's not in the list, so I will
need to use it directly". Which you did eventually do but not until
getting frustrated trying a few things.
So if you can think of some wording that would have made it clear
that any attempt to jam "deb.debian.org" onto the end of the
apt-cacher URI would not work, because it's not in the allowed list,
please do add it! The other thing is, maybe it was not clear that just
not using the
apt-cacher is not a big deal? All it does is save your data transfer
quota the bytes of downloading the packages and maybe is quicker if
another customer already downloaded them. That was a bigger deal back
in 2007 when customers had 100GB/month to use. Not so much today
when it's 4TB. Just following the Debian backports instructions
directly leads to something that works the way it's expected to.
Also added to the wiki. From above I inferred that downloads from
apt-cacher are not counted towards customer data transfer quota.
I'm unsure
how to derive the correct cached source URL, given that
the official backport instructions don't give a source URL which uses
ftp.uk.debian.org or backports.debian.org (or any of the other mirrors
listed in the wiki page).
Maybe this is clearer now that I've explained that
"deb.debian.org/debian" and "ftp.uk.debian.org/debian" are
essentially interchangeable? I suspect a few
small additions in the places I've highlighted
(Debian pages too, not just Bitfolk) would have made things
clearer.
Just make the changes to the BitFolk wiki articles that you think
make things clearer. If you make mistakes then I or someone else
will correct them hopefully without destroying the intent of what
you added. As it stands I don't know how to make them clearer maybe
because I don't know what people don't know, if you see what I mean.
Like the fact that the article pre-dates the existence of
deb.debian.org and I didn't know that Debian pages were using
"deb.debian.org/debian" more consistently as opposed to saying
things like "YOUR-DEBIAN-MIRROR/debian". I don't think I want to add deb.debian.org to the
apt-cacher allowed
list as I don't really see the point in it doing a geo-ip
redirection back to some other UK mirror. May as well just
explicitly use ftp.uk. I think I'd rather that people understood
that if they want to use a mirror that's not cached by apt-cacher
then just use it directly.
Yes that makes sense.
There is one remaining question. backports.debian.org is listed as
one of the available mirrors, but I still have no idea how one would
go about using that, or even whether it still makes sense to do so, rather than just using
deb http://apt-cacher.lon.bitfolk.com/debian/ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/
buster-backports main
It was the presence of backports.debian.org in the list combined with
the lack of any mention of that host in the official backports
instructions which confused me most. The fact that it's listed in the
wiki makes it look very much like that's what you should use to get
backports, but AFAICS that's not (necessarily) the case.