#!perl

=head1 HOW TO MIRROR CPAN

As of this writing the single purpose for this distribution is to
provide a backbone for the CPAN.

The idea is to get a handful backbone nodes that mirror directly from
PAUSE and a second layer that mirrors from them. Targetting at a
mirroring interval of 20 seconds.

The rsync daemon on PAUSE runs on port 8732 and you need a password to
access it. There is a second rsync daemon running on the standard port
873 but it has very limited access policies to leave the bandwidth for
the backbone.

If you have username and password you can mirror directly from PAUSE.
If you haven't and maintain a public CPAN mirror, ask me for one.
Otherwise pick your best CPAN mirror with an rsync server and try the
same script below for getting the quickest update cycle possible.

You find a list of potential rsync servers at
http://cpan.perl.org/SITES.html#RSYNC

The first thing you should prepare is the CPAN tree itself on your
disk. The source where you take it from does not matter that much.
Take it from where you always took it. The setup I suggest is to
mirror authors/ and modules/ with this program. And once per day or
per week or so do a traditional rsync from that old school mirroring
host, maybe excluding authors/ and modules/.

The loop is something like this:

    $ENV{USER}="sandy"; # fill in your name
    $ENV{RSYNC_PASSWORD} = "secret"; # fill in your passwd

    use File::Rsync::Mirror::Recent;
    my @rrr = map {
        File::Rsync::Mirror::Recent->new
                (
                 localroot                  => "/home/ftp/pub/PAUSE/$_", # your local path
                 remote                     => "pause.perl.org::PAUSE/$_/RECENT.recent", # your upstream
                 max_files_per_connection   => 863,
                 tempdir                    => "/home/ftp/tmp", # optional tempdir to hide temporary files
                 ttl                        => 10,
                 rsync_options              =>
                 {
                  port              => 8732, # only for PAUSE
                  compress          => 1,
                  links             => 1,
                  times             => 1,
                  checksum          => 0,
                  'omit-dir-times'  => 1, # not available before rsync 3.0.3
                 },
                 verbose                    => 1,
                 verboselog                 => "/var/log/rmirror-pause.log",
                )} "authors", "modules";
    die "directory $_ doesn't exist, giving up" for grep { ! -d $_->localroot } @rrr;
    while (){
        my $ttgo = time + 1200; # pick less if you have a password and/or consent from the upstream
        for my $rrr (@rrr){
            $rrr->rmirror ( "skip-deletes" => 1 );
        }
        my $sleep = $ttgo - time;
        if ($sleep >= 1) {
            print STDERR "sleeping $sleep ... ";
            sleep $sleep;
        }
    }

=pod

Don't forget to fill in your user name and password.

You see the 'skip-deletes' and guess, this is mirroring without doing
deletes. You can do it with deletes or you can leave the deletion to
the other, the traditional rsync loop. Worry about that later.

You see the option 'max_files_per_connection' which I filled with 863
and you need to find your favorite number. The larger the number the
faster the whole download goes. As you already have a mirror, you
probably want to take 10 or 20 times times that much. CPAN is at the
moment (2009-03) consisting of 142000 files. This option chunks the
downloads into piecemeal units and between these units the process
takes a peek at the most recent files to download them with higher
preference.

The localroot parameter contains your target directory. Because only
the authors/ and the modules/ directory are hosted by the PAUSE, you
need the loop over two directories. The other directories of CPAN are
currently not available for downloading with
File::Rsync::Mirror::Recent.

The 'port' is only needed for users who have a password for PAUSE,
other rsync servers listen on the rsync server port and the option can
be omitted.

The timeslice in the while loop above needs to be large enough to let
the rsync server survive. If you choose a random rsync server and are
not an rsync server yourself please be modest and choose 1200. Choose
less if you're offering rsync yourself and have a fat pipe, and
especially if you know your upstream can manage it. If you have a
PAUSE password choose 20 seconds. We will watch how well this works
and will adjust this recommendation according to our findings.

Set the key 'verbose' to 0 if you have no debugging demands. In this
case you want to omit the 'sleeping $sleep ...' noise further down the
script as well.

Set the key 'verboselog' to your favorite progress watcher file. This
option is underdeveloped and may later be replaced with something
better. Note that the program still sends error messages to STDERR.

You can leave everything else as it stands. Start experimenting and
let me know how it works out.

-- 
andreas koenig

=cut
