Re: Mirroring local archives locally and remotley

Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
>    > Note that for users of your mirrors, the name transparently
>    > remains your original archive name (without the `-MIRROR' thing),
>    > which is really neat.
>
>    I personally dislike the `-MIRROR' and `-SOURCE' special-casing.  I
>    found it hard to understand (especially when looking at the online
>    doc where it is unclear whether the capital letters denote
>    `@var{...}' in Texinfo terms, or whether they should be taken
>    literally), plus it leaves the impression that each archive can
>    only have one mirror.
>
> I agree, and I was specially reminded just recently why I also dislike
> it.  
>   

I don't think that there's any doubt but that it's a mis-feature.

It violates some principle of good taste or good design to give
archive names internal structure like that.   The particular syntax
is appalling.  Now that I don't use it every day I find that even I
wind up looking it up and taking three tries to use it correctly.
There's really nothing good about it.

I'm sure I can see how it happened:  I must have been too lazy
or too rushed on a given day to make the archive registration
database fancier.

It would be better if all related archives had the same name,  if
the database (in ~/.arch-params) kept track of source/mirror
relations, if there was indeed a command to update all mirrors
at once, if writes went automatically to the appropriate archive,
and if there were a command-line syntax for indicating a
specific mirror or source archive when many have the same
name.   I vaguely recall the idea being discussed on the list
some time ago but apparently not at a time that anybody felt
like working on it.

-t