Lack of mirrors for non-Ximian channels

I think I have found a huge gap in the Red Carpet "scheme-of-things." I'm
writing in hopes that someone can set me straight or else confirm that, no,
I'm not crazy, this is really true...

I have RedHat 7.3 (several machines) and I installed Red Carpet several
weeks ago when Redhat's RHN stopped offering free access to their update
tracking service. I subscribed to the Redhat 7.3 channel, got a list of
urgent and suggested updates, and went to town installing them. At first, it
worked just great. I started out with RedCarpet 1.x, then upgraded to 2.0
when it came out.

This month, though, all my attempts to perform updates of packages from the
Redhat 7.3 channel have been SOOO SLOOOW slow slow slow. I'm on a fast
university connection, but I usually couldn't get above 4 or 5kb/sec. Well,
I understand that the main Ximian servers can get loaded down. So I started
choosing mirror sites. No joy - just as slow. So, I went online to search
for reports about this problem. I read the archives of this list, and noted
that (a) a bug report long ago mentioned failure of the software to apply a
chosen mirror, but that was listed as fixed in Bugzille, and (b) there had
been some problems with the main Ximian server for Red Carpet "basic" a
while ago, but no mention of this in the last week or two.

I noticed that one update went a lot faster than others. When I looked in
/var/log/rcd/rcd-messages, I saw that this one update came from the mirror I
had selected. The log also confirmed that my mirror selection was being
applied at each startup of the RC GUI (and was being displayed correctly in
the prefs window.) The one file that updated fast was a package from the Red
Carpet channel.  Hmmmm....

All my attempts to update *Redhat* packages went very slow, and showed up in
the log as coming ONLY from
rc-pkginfo.ximian.com/redhat-73-i386/redhat-73-i386/whatever-package-N.N.i38
6.rpm EVEN THOUGH just above that the log shows I was getting listings from
my chosen mirror (either ximian.netnitco.net or ximian.orst.edu).
So I decided to use a web browser to look at the mirror site.

Then it hit me: these are mirrors of Ximian packages - and only of those. I
looked over the web directories of both the Netnitco and ORST mirrors, and
they looked the same: all Ximian products, no other vendors (on that
address/directory heirarchy, at least.)

So, Red Carpet's channels for other vendors' distributions do not have the
benefit of any mirrors at all!

Whoa!

I have formed an inference that when I have a mirror selected (in rug or Red
Carpet), but I try to get a package/update that is not part of the Ximian
lineup carried by the Ximian mirror sites, Red Carpet (and rug)
automatically revert back to Ximian's main server. It does find the file
there, and starts retrieving it, but that server is really overloaded
(and/or throttled for "basic" users).

So, am I missing something here, or is there a big gap in this mirroring
strategy? Don't we need a way to have a separate list of mirrors for
channels tracking non-Ximian distributions such as RedHat? There are of
course lots of mirrors of RedHat packages. However, Red Carpet seems to be
unable to take advantage of those, and must go back to Ximian's own servers
for every non-Ximian package.

Please tell me if I'm missing the point here somehow.

P.S. And hey - thanks for the huge amount of work behind Red Carpet.
--
Jim Prall
Systems Programmer
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of Toronto
http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall


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