[Savannah-hackers-public] Re: Savannah Mirror statistics

[Alex Fernandez]

Hi again,

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 8:37 PM, Sylvain Beucler <address@hidden> wrote:
> (If you don't mind I'm CCing savannah-hackers-public because other
> people in the Savannah team are interested in knowing what we're
> working on :))

I don't mind at all. In fact, the biggest missing piece is a response
from address@hidden It seems like the easiest piece (getting logs
from them for www.nongnu.org) yet they haven't answered my query. I am
cc'ing them; if anyone could let them know what we are trying to do
here I would be so grateful. For background:
  https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?106700

> This will make us miss some downloads.  I don't know if SF handles
> this case, but when a user saves the mirror link somewhere, mail it to
> friends, put it in a script, etc, then people will directly hit the
> mirror without passing through the SF mirror selection. So the most
> accurate source of information is the mirror's log.

That is why the redirect needs to be done _after_ the click. The
directory in /releases should point to a file on /releases, and this
final link is what should be redirected to the mirror. If a user
copies the link they aren't even aware that they will be redirected
somewhere.

I believe that is how Google search pages work right now (it wasn't
always this way): the search page links back to Google, and this
Google link redirects to the actual link.

> Restricting the redirection to files instead of directories might be a
> good thing, though, to avoid people wondering "where did my file
> disappear" right after they uploaded them :)  I'll have a look.

There is a related problem with mirror updates -- it can take up to a
day for new files to appear in mirrors, so the redirect can point to a
missing file. I have seen this happen on Sourceforge too, but the
window is probably much shorter. I don't know how to solve this one
easily. We could always check periodically, and only redirect to the
mirror if the file is actually there; otherwise send to
releases-noredirect. This method is more robust for users, but it
makes the setup much more fragile.

Cheers,

Alex Fernández.