[Gnu-arch-users] Re: Preliminary Arch Cache available

[Miles Bader]

Aaron Bentley <address@hidden> writes:
>>>Oh, but you don't usually want to cache local archives.  Maybe you'd 
>>>specify "uncached:" for local archives, and otherwise, they'd be cached.
>> 
>> Um, local archives usually have a filename instead of a pseudo-URL; can't you
>> just notice that?
>
> I'm just thinking on my feet here, but some apparently-local paths 
> aren't actually local.  FUSE and LUFS, maybe even NFS or SMB over thin 
> pipes.  You'd want those cached, even though they look local.
>
> I suppose you could use cached: only for local filesystems you wanted to 
> cache, but I doubt the uncached: would be a frequent problem; most 
> people will have far more remote archives than local ones.

I don't know; I seem to have a pretty even mixture -- including both
local and NFS file paths -- but not defaulting to uncached for file
paths just seems wrong.

I think that the default should be to cater to the usual case; archives
with a URL are _usually_ remote, and archives with simple directory
names are _usually_ (really) local, so that's what the cache should
default to assuming.

It's great to have both cached: and uncached: modifiers to force the
issue other way for unusual cases of course, and also great to be able
to set a personal default (actually a regexp->caching-default mapping
would be really nice for people like me at work, where certain filename
paths are always in NFS and others are always on local disk).

Anyway, all this stuff can of course wait until the rest of the design
is more sorted.  :-)

-Miles
-- 
Come now, if we were really planning to harm you, would we be waiting here, 
 beside the path, in the very darkest part of the forest?