I've not written about Gentoo for quite sometime, and that's primarily because I was too lazy to update my dev blog. Since Livejournal has been doing tag based rss feeds for a while now, I thought I'll get it updated at the planet and should hopefully write a bit more ;)

The method we've been using to handle new mirror bugs has been quite sub-optimal these past few years ;) Basically, we get a bug for a new mirror...and we run a few scripts to check if it's okay, then we let the mirror sit for a while before running the same set of checks and the repeats prolly one more time and if the results are favourable, the mirror is added into rotation. This is the process for both rsync (gentoo-portage aka the portage tree) and distfiles (source tarballs) mirrors. The point where the process umm failed was between checks, since there are quite a few things going on, mostly real life related. And so some of our mirrors have had to wait months before they were approved as official mirrors.

That's not a nice situation to have and I'd like to apologize for the delays that have happened in the past. We've made some changes that will really help processing new mirror bugs way faster than before and leave us free to work on bad mirror/other mirror related bugs.

Last weekend, thanks to a poke by robbat2, I hacked up a little script that automates our mirror checking and drops us an email with the results. All it needs is information from a simple tab de-limited file which has information about the bug, mirror address/IP, type of mirror etc. This really takes out the need for us to attend to new mirror bugs, since all that's needed it adding one line to a file and then the rest is taken care of.

The second change is that we now have an upper limit of 2 weeks to close off new mirror bugs. If a mirror is in sync and doing fine, we aim to finish processing the mirror and adding it into our list of mirrors within this timeframe. To this end we'll mark the due date on the subject of the bug to help us keep track of it.

I'd like to thank our mirrors/mirror admins/sponsors for standing by Gentoo and helping out. Thanks a ton folks and keep em coming! :)

The other small thing that robbat2 and me wanted to get out of the way, was to update our infra server list, which we've completed bar a few machines. So yay for that as well!