FreeBSD mirror and some issues with Perl (with suggestion for change!)

[Benjamin Kaduk]

On Tue, 10 Apr 2012, Espen Tagestad wrote:

> From the documentation on how to set up a FreeBSD mirror:
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/hubs/mirror-howto.html
>
> ... there is a paragraf written like this:
> "ftp/mirror was very popular, but seemed to have some drawbacks, as it 
> is written in perl(1), and had real problems with mirroring large 
> directories like a FreeBSD site."

That text dates essentially from 2002, when the article received a 
"complete makeover" and this entire section was added.  I have no 
particular reason to know whether it is still accurate or not.

>
> Beeing a user of both FreeBSD and Perl for years (and probably for years 
> to come) I don't find this formulation providing Perl any justice. 
> What's the issue with Perl? That it has to be installed additionally? I 
> don't care about the mirror program itself (I went for the rsync way). 
> Would it be a less drawback if it was written in Ruby or Python?
>
> Suggestion for change:
> "ftp/mirror was very popular, but had real problems with mirroring large 
> directories like a FreeBSD site."

I have no real objection to removing the perl reference, but if this 
sentence is touched at all, it seems like it should first be verified that 
the past ten years of history have not changed the performance 
characteristics of ftp/mirror.

-Ben Kaduk