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Home » Community » General Info and Discussion » HTTP-redirect-cloning distros a la Devuan (an interesting way to cherry-pick from parent repositories?)
HTTP-redirect-cloning distros a la Devuan [message #9] Sat, 08 July 2017 11:27 Go to next message
KRT1 is currently offline  KRT1
Messages: 24
Registered: March 2017
Location: sol 3
Junior Member
Recently on the EOMA68-related mailing list:

http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/2017-July/014358.html

I caught this bit:

Quote:
the devuan team have a really nice team spirit, and their work is of
significant interest beyond just debian/devuan. the technique of
HTTP-redirect-cloning distros has useful implications for other libre
(e.g. FSF-Endorseable) distros that wish to remove certain packages
but do not wish to host a hundred gigabytes worth of tens of thousands
of files to do so, not least because it would be insanely impractical
to do so, just for the purposes of e.g. removing nonfree firmware or
trademarked images and words.
Seems like it might be an interesting to apply to the Slackware repositories, if it isn't already being done that way.

Just thought I'd throw it out there. Anyone know anything about this?
Re: HTTP-redirect-cloning distros a la Devuan [message #28 is a reply to message #9] Sun, 15 April 2018 17:02 Go to previous messageGo to next message
alienbob
Messages: 1
Registered: April 2018
Junior Member
Slackware Coreteam
What you call "HTTP-redirect-cloning distros" is a way to mask that you are in fact using other people's bandwidth (and their work too of course). It is a practice that is not fair toward the people who pay money for that bandwidth.
For instance the Slackware mirror-network consists of university servers, company servers and private servers behind a residential DSL/cable connection. Like mine.
If binary Slackware packages and/or sources are being downloaded from my server at home, I want that to be for the benefit of Slackware, not for a group of people that re-uses the packages that were compiled by the packagers of another Distro but can't be bothered to arrange their own hosting.

Note that I am sympathetic to your goal, even though I do not share your view about what constitutes 'libre software'. By creating a 'libre' version of Slackware, you are filling a niche, which is appreciated by people.
And I know I am ranting, but this is not directed towards you - you are in fact hosting your own stuff on your own server. Great!

I just wanted to let you know my opinion about "HTTP-redirect-cloning distros".

Eric
Re: HTTP-redirect-cloning distros a la Devuan [message #29 is a reply to message #28] Mon, 16 April 2018 16:50 Go to previous messageGo to next message
connie is currently offline  connie
Messages: 28
Registered: January 2017
Junior Member
Freenix Ninja
Quote:
What you call "HTTP-redirect-cloning distros" is a way to mask that you are in fact using other people's bandwidth (and their work too of course). It is a practice that is not fair toward the people who pay money for that bandwidth.
I agree. Not only it's basically bandwidth leeching (when without a prior explicit agreement), in our case it would also probably violate FSDG, which seems to strongly imply that the project must not provide a repository which is already tainted or might probably become tainted in the future (i.e. with incorrect/unclear blacklist policy). This is not an interpretation of FSDG I would personally defend, but in Freenix' case there are also good technical reasons for keeping the repo completely separate. The main reason being, we cannot with a straight face claim to filter out proprietary software, while the Slackware project has the technical means to change the repo at will, and no spelled-out policy as to what may be included. We also need our own repo in order to provide the rsync interface. May be it's just my ignorance, but I don't see how we could possibly convince anyone to mirror our repo, if they also have to re-implement the blacklisting and the component replacement!

[Updated on: Mon, 16 April 2018 16:53]

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Re: HTTP-redirect-cloning distros a la Devuan [message #32 is a reply to message #9] Tue, 08 May 2018 01:58 Go to previous message
KRT1 is currently offline  KRT1
Messages: 24
Registered: March 2017
Location: sol 3
Junior Member
Cool, thanks for the detailed explanation, I honestly had no idea what exactly was meant by that when I came across it. Well enough, I can see the potential problems now, and I can see how it doesn't apply so well to our case here. I was just putting it out there to see what the consensus was. Now that I have been informed, I can see the issues that such a method would bring. Much appreciated.
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