onefang wrote:
> Devuan package mirror herder here.

And thank you for doing all of that work! It's appreciated. :-)

> Bob Proulx <rwp> wrote:
> > I have been a long time user of apt-cacher-ng used with Debian
> > repositories. But I routinely see the above errors when using it with
> > Devuan round-robin mirrors. I never see it when using apt-cacher-ng
> > using the primary mirror.
>
> We try to avoid encouraging the direct usage of pkgmaster, since that
> would increase it's load, and get in the way of the other mirrors
> syncing.

Right. And I didn't want to encourage that either. But let's say one
used a single well connected package mirror such as your own sledjhamr
with apt-cacher-ng, or hopefully a close local one. Then I think it
might mostly work with only much smaller windows of time when problems
are possible. I can't say this always works because even when I have
seen failures it might go a long time between problems.

> > This leads me to believe, though I do not have facts to back this up,
> > that the round-robin mirrors are not atomically updated in a way that
> > provides a consistent view for downstream caching.
>
> I have a TODO item to write a syncing script to sort that out. But
> herding mirror admins is like herding cats.

The debmirror script can be used to update mirrors "correctly" such
that they are consistent before, during, and as they updated. I have
found it light weight and accessible. That's one possible tool.

The official Debian mirrors require use of the official ftpmirror
script. That's probably the way Devuan should go too.

    https://www.debian.org/mirror/ftpmirror#how

Bob