Let guix client accept HTTP redirection

Let guix client accept HTTP redirection

[Peng Mei Yu]

Hello,

I have a good news and a bad news.

Good news.  The maintainers of mirrors.sjtug.sjtu.edu.cn (an academic
free software mirror site) agreed to accept Guix into their support
list.

Bad news.  Their first implementation of a Guix mirror failed.  Their
server architecture is like this: A front-end program accepts HTTP
requests.  It looks up the requested resource from a storage server
similar to Amazon S3.  If the resource is found on storage server,
return an HTTP 302 redirection to the storage server.  If the resource
is not found, return an HTTP 302 redirection to ci.guix.gnu.org and
fetch the resource from ci.guix.gnu.org then store it in the storage
server.  So the next time the same resource is requested, it can be
served from the storage server.

During the test, we found that guix client does not accept HTTP 302
redirection.  So we are working on a different implementation.  In the
meantime, I think the problem should be reported here and let's find out
if something can be done from the Guix side.


--
Peng Mei Yu

Re: Let guix client accept HTTP redirection

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Peng Mei Yu <pengmeiyu@riseup.net> skribis:

> Good news.  The maintainers of mirrors.sjtug.sjtu.edu.cn (an academic
> free software mirror site) agreed to accept Guix into their support
> list.

Nice!

> Bad news.  Their first implementation of a Guix mirror failed.  Their
> server architecture is like this: A front-end program accepts HTTP
> requests.  It looks up the requested resource from a storage server
> similar to Amazon S3.  If the resource is found on storage server,
> return an HTTP 302 redirection to the storage server.  If the resource
> is not found, return an HTTP 302 redirection to ci.guix.gnu.org and
> fetch the resource from ci.guix.gnu.org then store it in the storage
> server.  So the next time the same resource is requested, it can be
> served from the storage server.
>
> During the test, we found that guix client does not accept HTTP 302
> redirection.  So we are working on a different implementation.  In the
> meantime, I think the problem should be reported here and let's find out
> if something can be done from the Guix side.

Yes, people reported that issue just recently:

  https://issues.guix.gnu.org/45174

Until that is fixed, and until the fix propagates to user installations,
I think you’ll have to arrange so that the mirror transparently proxies
requests instead of returning 302, or just returns 404.  How does that
sound?

Thanks,
Ludo’.