Dear all, Yesterday and today I spent a little time going over the UDML script of MirrorManager2. Going through it, I ended up with few questions regarding it. * Repository name UMDL's code clearly says: # historically, Repository.name was a longer string with # product and category deliniations. But we were getting # unique constraint conflicts once we started introducing # repositories under repositories. And .name isn't used for # anything meaningful. So simply have it match dir.name, # which can't conflict. And quickly grepping through MM2's sources, I could not find a reference to this, we alway rely on the repository's prefix, not its name. Question: Should we drop this? It makes things confusing and is basically noise since we do not use it anywhere. * Readable status of directories The Directory table has a 'readable' property, none of our directories is not readable. Question is: what is the use-case for this boolean? * Changes while running Looking at the code, the UMDL seems to be very careful to handle changes on the FS while it is running. One hope I have is to speed up the UMDL run time, but I'm curious. Question: Does anyone know if the FS changes often while the UMDL is actually running? Gaining speed of course does not mean being wreakless but I'm curious as to how often this situation occurs. IIRC, we trigger the UMDL via fedmsg now, right? So in theory, the FS shouldn't change too much under the UMDL's feet. * The directory table So looking at the database and more precisely the directory table in that database, it seems we store all the directories of the tree, ie: /pub/alt/ /pub/alt/anaconda/ /pub/alt/bfo/ /pub/alt/bfo/gpxe-20120514 ... This makes me a little pondering. What is the interest of keeping the whole list of directories in the DB ? After all, as far as I understand, the UMDL finds the repo in the tree (repo being defined by the presence of a 'repodata' folder containing the repomd.xml or by the presence of a 'summary' file and an 'objects' folder). For these repo, we look for the most recent files, stores this info in the DB and later use it to check if the mirrors are up to date. But do we need to checking that ``pub/fedora/linux`` exists when we later check that ``pub/fedora/linux/updates/testing/21/x86_64/`` exists and is up to date? I am under the impression currently that dropping un-necessary directories would save DB space (the directories being then linked in the host_category_dir table listing for each host, in each category which dir are present) as well as crawling time (both in the UMDL and in the crawler). * Non-directory based support in UDML. So the UMDL script currently supports three ways of crawling the tree: * file * rsync * directory We, in Fedora, are only using the last one. I believe the `rsync` mode was added to support Ubuntu and the file mode is basically a simplified version of the directory mode, but that we do not use at at the moment. I would like to propose that we drop support for rsync. I feel that it may be simpler and easier to create an UMDL and a crawler for each distro that would like to use MirrorManager than maintaining a one-script-fits-all UMDL that is in fact tested for only one of the scenario. That being said, if we ever have interest from Ubuntu, CentOS or any other communities, we should definitively look into making the UMDL and crawler as re-usable as possible for them, but keeping the distro-specific bits separated. Looking forward hearing your thoughts about these points and questions, Thanks, Pierre