[GRASSweb-list]Mirror Sites out of sync accusations

[Markus Neteler]

On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 02:16:59AM +0800, Dan Jacobson wrote:
> GRASS GIS Mirror Sites page comments:
> 
> Regarding the "out of sync" mirrors wording,
> 
> What if you were a pharmaceutical manufacturer and your were pleading
> with your branch offices to fix something right on your web pages.
> Consumers would be quite worried.

Why? Like the the GRASS users know that they got oldish stuff.
 
> I looked at the front page of the Taiwan site. It seems kind of fresh.

No, it is not.
ftp://grass.itc.it/pub/grass
-> File: grass_addons.html  8 KB  07/01/2003  11:10:00 AM

ftp://ftp1.sinica.edu.tw/pub4/GIS/grass/
->  grass_addons.html. . . . . . . . . . . . Mar  6 13:27      7k


> But one can't easily tell, so,

Right.
 
> Proposal:
> On every mirror site and the main site, the page that says
> 
> Welcome to the GRASS GIS Homepage!
> You are at the official GRASS site in Italy (or mirrors site) 
> 
> should then say:
> this site is refreshed once a day. If it is now well beyond
> Thu Jul  3 02:12:58 GMT-8 2003
> then this site is now out of sync with the main site.

How to add that? The master pages at grass.itc.it are read from
the CVS server four times a day.
The only way I can see is to change the reading cron job to modify
this page after 'cvs up' from GRASS CVS. Mhhh.
 
 
> And, when doing the rsyncs, be sure that that page is the last it the
> list to be updated, as that way partial updates will still reveal
> something is wrong.

How to tell rsync to read index.html as last page? The only way I can
see is that all mirror maintainers add a second rsync command to only
read index.html. Not sure if they are willing to do that.
 
> Also, on the mirrors page, list the names, TEL no's and emails and
> Homepages of each mirror maintainer.

Look into the source code of that page, the contact addresses are
stored as comment inside.