Justin C. Sherrill wrote:
quoted text
> FTP hosts could be used too, as only the original request has to be HTTP;
> the redirect just has to be in the form of a URL, and
> fetch/wget/firefox/whatever will all understand it.

Only that pkg_add doesn't cope with that I believe.

quoted text
> Of course, now I've come up with the idea, so I suppose I have to put up
> or shut up.

Okay, how about some rough design:

URL format:
http://host/DragonFly/1.10/packages/2007Q2  or
http://host/DragonFly/snapshots
------------^-----------------^

take the local part, have configs like this:

cgi-data/DragonFly/snapshots.hosts

of course, prevent any char ~! /[[:alnum:]_\/-]/ in the url to sanitize
the parameter.

The hosts file would then just contain
# hosts for pkgsrc 2007Q2
# hostname						prio
http://chlamydia....../2007Q2/DragonFly-1.10/All/	20

of course the prio field etc could be ignored now/added later.

The CGI just reads in the specified file and outputs a random host from
the list.  Later there could be a hostname lookaside data file which
contains data like priority, response time, etc.  all the stuff we don't
need anyways.

I guess that's under 50 lines of ruby code.

Mind you that this is to support < 10 hits per hour.  Maybe 200 per hour
when we are flashed on a release.

cheers
  simon