Les Mikesell wrote:
Here's a wild thought, maybe the whole idea of ISO images, sampling a copy of the rest of the repo state base-only or with updates, is actually the evil part here.
Partly right.
I see :-)
It's obviously horribly wasteful and not particularly useful to have a gazillion mirror copies of the giant every-changing workspace of fedora archived away. However, isos make good bittorrent and rsync targets and as such make sense for bandwidth sharing and saving.
Bittorrent and rsync works fine with directories of files.
Maintaining local yum repos means you have to mirror a lot of gunk you'll never use and relying on remote ones means trouble when things get out of sync. What we need is a more intelligent way to share bandwidth without cluttering the world with useless snapshots.
A cacheing proxy might be interesting to solve this objection, rather than an explicit mirror. Then nothing is pulled down that is not a selected package for at least one proxy user.
-Andy