BSDCan2007 - Confirmed Schedule
BSDCan 2007
The Technical BSD Conference
| Speakers | |
|---|---|
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Colin Percival |
| Schedule | |
|---|---|
| Day | 4 |
| Room | SITE A0150 |
| Start time | 11:30 |
| Duration | 01:00 |
| Info | |
| ID | 36 |
| Event type | Lecture |
| Track | Advanced |
| Language | English |
| Feedback | |
|---|---|
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Portsnap
What (it is), Why (it was written), and How (it works)
In this talk, I will describe three years of development on portsnap: Why I wrote it, the design decisions I made, and the lessons I learned. While portsnap is a utility with a very narrow focus -- distributing updates to the FreeBSD ports tree -- the lessons learned from it are far more widely applicable, and this can be considered as a "case study" of software for distributing and keeping a set of files updated.
I won't know exactly what I'll cover until I prepare my slides, but topics are likely to include
- An overview of portsnap (build code vs. mirroring code vs. client code)
- Why I decided to write portsnap: Security, security, security
- The basic idea behind portsnap: Divide the tree into lots of small pieces plus an index which says which bits go where
- The messier details: Distributing INDEX files as well
- Why portsnap is fast: Pipelined HTTP
- Why there isn't any srcsnap/docsnap/wwwsnap/cvssnap (but there might be a tarsnap some day)