[ANN] LatAm Squeaksource Mirror online again

> Hi all,
>
> I'm happy to announce that the Latin American public, read-only Squeaksource mirror is again up and running. (We are bringing the contents up to date right now, it should be competely up-to-date in about 5 hours ...) The URL is: http://www.dsal.cl/squeaksource/ Note that you can use this mirror *in a completely transparent fashion*.
>
> We have worked out a solution to the privacy issues raised by the first iteration of our mirror. I would like to emphasize that private data has never been present on the mirror, only the name of private projects was accessible.
>
> TECHNICAL DETAILS BELOW. Please redistribute this announcement!
>
> (below is mainly a repeat of the body of my previous mail)
>
> MOTIVATION:
> For us, Switzerland is a long way and the connection to Squeaksource has always been painfully slow. We've set up this mirror to help to address this, and I imagine that it will be of use not only for the Chileans but also other countries in latin america, which is why I am announcing it here.
>
> ITS TRANSPARENT:
> I've worked out a way to make the use of this mirror transparent when using Pharo 1.3: you just use monticello as always, and have a setting to redirect loads from Squeaksource to wherever you want. I have successfully loaded Moose and Seaside from the mirror using this package, so it should work for you. And I can tell you, it was blazingly fast: Seaside loaded in 5m45, and most of the time was spent compiling ... ;-)
>
> So try the mirror and the package out, send me your comments, we want to work on this to make Squeaksource a better experience for everybody.
>
> HOW TO USE from Pharo 1.3:
> - Get the redirection package from http://www.squeaksource.com/MonticelloRedirect
> - To load from the mirror instead of from Squeaksource, do-it of the following:
> MRManager redirectFrom: 'http://www.squeaksource.com/' to: 'http://www.dsal.cl/squeaksource/'.
> - To remove this redirection: MRManager removeFrom: 'http://www.squeaksource.com/'.
> - See comments of MRManager for more info. MRManager list can be useful at some times.
> - Only 2 classes, < 10 methods, not counting accessors. The trick is the use of MethodWrappers.
> - I did not test this in Squeak or other versions of Pharo. Feel free to try it out in your environment and send me patches if needed.
> - There is no UI, contributions are welcome!!
>
> DETAILS ON THE MIRROR
> - It's a full copy of Squeaksource, updated daily.
> - The mirror is read-only: if you want to make a commit you still have to do it in Squeaksource. This is to avoid all the complications of distributed writes.
> - Updates happen once a day, before midnight Chilean time. Updates take typically (up till now) 200 minutes (!), average download speed here is 200KB/s :-(
> - Lukas Renggli pointed out that the Squeaksource sitemap file provides a list of projects. We pass this to wget (with some massaging of the data inbetween).
> - The software that does the mirror is available here: https://github.com/vramiro/easy-wget-mirror
>
> MANY THANKS TO:
> - Daniel Galdames for doing the original mirroring tests
> - Victor Ramiro for taking Daniels' work and putting it in production
> - The Squeaksource team for helping us, especially Fabrizio Perin and Mircea Lungu
> - Lukas Renggli for pointing out the issues with the previous version and providing an alternative.
> - You for trying it out and telling us about it!
>
>
> ---> Save our in-boxes! http://emailcharter.org <---
>
> Johan Fabry  
> [hidden email] - http://dcc.uchile.cl/~jfabry
> PLEIAD Lab - Computer Science Department (DCC) - University of Chile
>
>
>
>
>
>
>