Consider hosting a Ravenports mirror in other parts of the world

[EarldridgeJazzedPineda]

Currently, and for the past 7+ years, the only Ravenports mirror is in California, United States, hosted under Hurricane Electric LLC and Idiom Consulting. This makes package downloads very slow outside of North America, and they tend to be the slowest in Asia, where download speeds are 100 kilobytes per second at best, and 1 kilobyte per second at worst.

The Ravenports project should have at least one mirror in Asia, or it can use something like Fastly to make package downloads faster for everyone in different parts of the world.

[jrmarino]

Well, typically somebody that owns a server offers to host a mirror.
That is welcome of course.

I will say that mirror support really needs a dedicated script to ensure the repository is "switched on" as an integrated set of packages. The worst case is a typical mirroring setup where packages are synced one by one (e.g. with rsync). That will cause issues because the package catalog expects all packages to be available at once.

So essentially an update needs to happen slowly in the background, and when all packages are synced, the script would update a symbolic link to the directory so it's switched instantaneously. There is a whole lot of stuff happening in the background to minimize the amount of data that needs to be transferred and that implies at least two full sets of packages for each directory that is publicly facing.

I've thought about this for years but never had to implement the scripts because there are no mirrors yet.