Bug#1134366: www.debian.org: packages.debian.org requires javascript

Hi,

Am 20. April 2026 18:23:28 MESZ schrieb Helge Kreutzmann <[email protected]>:
>
>Do you have some anti-DDOS or rate-limiting in place for debian.org?

I noticed that packages.d.o is somewhat unstable sometimes (I remember error messages like "no healthy backend available" or similar).
Not sure what to do against this though (or if this has already been addressed?).

Since several weeks (months?) Debian uses some mechanism to deal with issues like
<https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by-ai-companies/>
Maybe this is your problem?
I was unable to find the name of the tool, though...

>> Are you sure, these scripts are accessing packages.debian.org? I guess not.
>
>You are guessing wrong.
>If you look at the script, the core call is:
>wget --quiet -O - "http://packages.debian.org/sid/amd64/$package/download"
>
>where $package stores the Debian package in question (the script
>iterates over all supported packages).

Hmm, I wonder if packages.d.o is the best service to use for such script runs.
Wouldn't it be more reasonable to pull the packages from a mirror?

That way, you would not rely on a single service/machine; using deb.debian.org would allow to use the CDN (content delivery network) service with its built-in capabilities, to use the best available mirror, or skip a mirror if it's down and choose another one automatically...
And load-balancing (on the mirror side) would also be included.


Holger