Subject: bug#28159: Updater needs to support HTTP(S) servers

From: [email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès)
Date: Sun, 03 Sep 2017 23:40:18 +0200

Hi Hartmut,

Hartmut Goebel <[email-masked]> skribis:

> Also by chance ftp.gnu.org also provides a file `find.txt.gz`, listing
> all files, including the full path:
>
>     ./video/Stephen_Fry-Happy_Birthday_GNU-nq_600px_425kbit.ogv
>     ./old-gnu/g77/g77-0.5.21.tar.gz
>     ./old-gnu/guile
>     ./old-gnu/guile/guile-www-1.0.1.tar.gz
>     ./old-gnu/guile/guile-1.3.2.tar.gz

This one is nice and smaller than ‘ls-lR’.  I reimplemented the GNU
updater in terms of this file, and kept the previous FTP-based updater
around for GNU packages not hosted on ftp.gnu.org:

  https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=100b216d8a4218daec4a79024d62d54b52dc07be

“guix refresh -t gnu” is now much faster.

The next step may be to have a more-or-less generic updater based on
‘ls-lR’ files.

Thanks,
Ludo’.