Hi,

we currently carry Debian mirror URLs in many different packages. It
would be great if there could be one package that shipped a machine
readable list of the currently correct mirror URLs for each distro.

This is useful, because we have already gone through many iterations of
mirror URLs like http.debian.net, httpredir.debian.org, deb.debian.org.
Now with bullseye we switched the security mirror from stable/updates to
stable-security. And currently on debian-devel there is a discussion
about http versus https as a default for the mirrors.

If we shipped the information in one central package like
distro-info-data, then whenever we change it, we'd only need to change
this package and not all the many packages that require this
information.

Thanks!

cheers, josch

Hi,
of
deb.debian.org.
to

Which packages are currently shipping that information? I agree that it
would be good to have this information in a central place.

But the scope is more complex if we count in Ubuntu. Ubuntu has
http://ports.ubuntu.com/ for non-x86 architectures. Ubuntu also does not
have an equivalent to deb.debian.org - so consumers might need to have a
list of mirrors to select from.

Hi Johannes (2021.09.03_09:09:02_-0400)

I've put some thought into this bug (and similar ones) over the years.

I like the idea of distro-info & distro-info-data taking on more
responsibility, but it probably means we need to redesign the data
schema. I'm thinking YAML/toml data.

That in turn means rewriting the distro-info libraries (at least to
provide a new API for the new data).

I'd be tempted to write the canonical implementation in rust and have
bindings in Perl/Python/C. But we could also have completely separate
implementations as we do right now.

So, basically, from my PoV, the reason this bug has languished is
because these are big changes and I haven't felt the urge to start on
them. If somebody were to propose a data model, I'd be happy to review
it and discuss next steps.

SR

Hi Johannes (2023.01.16_21:28:53_+0000)

To expand on that. I think Debian and Ubuntu have got a little closer in
their release models. Both now have LTS and ELTS (with different
semantics).

If we start including more distros (like Devuan), we should probably try
harder to have the same code for working with all the distros data, and
have it be more configuration-driven. At the moment the Ubuntu and
Debian code in distro-info is quite different.

We'll also probably need a script to generate data in the old CSV
format, for current stable releases.

SR

I can only say +1 for that. I am tempted to use distro-info as another
good real world use case to write some Rust. YAML or toml would be the
fitting data storage format.