Replacing or dropping publish_distro

[lkocman]

Hello team,

publish_distro seems to have a simple job of rsyncing one directory to another (ftp-stage to ftp-prod), with a delay of n-hours, and there is a cleanup mechanism to keep older copies of files for n-days. I guess the first comes handy to ensure that all data is written/synced to ftp-stage by obs publisher, and the latter comes in handy so people don't get their repodata constantly invalidated during the development cycle.

However, we do see weird anomalies when appliances for the released version of Leap 15.X are not refreshed for months and simply calling the script with --force fixes it.

Configuration is doubtful (regexes that don't have much use in the current logic) etc. And overall the script tries to be to smarty-pants for what it's supposed to do.

The part for mirror brain was disabled in favor of mirror cache which we don't have to worry about.

publish.log

Could we have a simpler replacement and do we need it at all?

[lkocman]

Otherwise this is a low prio item

[lkocman]

publish_log_setx.log
Seems like we're hitting issue with cross-device links

rsync: [generator] failed to hard-link /srv/ftp-stage/pub/opensuse//distribution/leap/15.5/appliances/openSUSE-Leap-15.5-ARM-E20-efi.aarch64.raw.xz with openSUSE-Leap-15.5-ARM-E20-efi.aarch64.raw.xz: Invalid cross-device link (18)

[bmwiedemann]

In general it is still good to delay deletion of old files for some hours in case users do zypper ref ; zypper up and then take some time to confirm. Also syncing new files to mirrors can take 1h.

So overall, we could even use 3 phases for distribution packages (so not /repositories):

1. only add new files and wait 30m until they hit mirrors
2. sync all, but don't delete old files yet
3. delete old files after some hours

[andrii-suse]

FYI, I am investigating options for combined solution covering/integrating publish_distro, repopusher and tumbleweed-snapshot. Maybe MirrorCache integration as well. Have some ideas atm, but not sure how it will look like. So in case of any ideas or status check - let me know.