[CentOS-devel] os/ and kickstart/ seem identical on Centos 8?

On Thu, 26 Sep 2019 at 05:29, Simon Matter via CentOS-devel
<centos-devel at centos.org> wrote:
>
> > On 26/09/2019 10:06, Kaj Niemi wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >>
> >> Is it on purpose that under AppStream, BaseOS, PowerTools (but not under
> >> extras, fasttrack and centosplusplus) there is an os and a kickstart
> >> directory for each architecture? On a quick glance the directory layout
> >> and contents seem rather identical.
> >>
> >> Asking as “we” do a local mirror of releases and started wondering about
> >> the amount of disk space 8 takes.
> >>
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > kickstart is a snapshot of os at GA/release time.
> > So that permits people to deploy with exactly same content without
> > having a moving target, as BaseOS/AppStream will be including updates as
> > they land.
> >
> > WRT disk space, hopefully, as explained on how to mirror correctly
> > (https://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/CreatePublicMirrors) , you use -H for
> > rsync, as we heavily use hardlinks in our trees so that it reduces space
> > and also used bandwidth to sync mirror content
>
> Hi,
>
> I was just wondering why it wasn't implemented with symlinks? They have
> the advantage that they can be recognized easily IMHO. You could then go a
> step further and even create an updates/ directory with only symlinks to
> the corresponding files. It would allow to still have an updates/
> directory which some of us are missing now.
>

>From dealing with mirroring issues a long time, large number of
symlinks in a directory have broken various filesystems that various
systems use. You end up with sites with missing symlinks, broken
symlinks or other anomalies. If you hardlink the mirror might download
the file twice but it will be there. If you symlink hundreds of files,
you are debugging client issues to a mirror you don't control and you
have to make your check script even more complicated to confirm that
things are there versus just look to be there.

It isn't that it can't be done, it just means extra work in multiple
places to make it work consistently.


> Regards,
> Simon
>
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-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.