KDE4 windows binary distribution

[Ralf Habacker]

Hi,

today I have gotten access to the staging server of the kde4 mirror 
system which means we can release windows package onto the kde4 mirrors 
in the near future. Additional we have access to the sourceforge high 
bandwith mirror system for the same purpose.

There is a really need to add additional mirrors because the servers we 
are currently using are partial overloaded.

To give you some impressions:

In Dezember 2007 there were files downloaded with a complete size of 
about 1 TB, for example kdebase-mingw-3.95-1-bin.zip was downloaded 
about 4000 times.
The Top 30 of 101 Total Countries from this month are listed below

Top 30 of 101 Total Countries
#  Hits            Files           Volume              Country
1  38283  17.18%  33162  19.63%   54.33 GB   6.52%  United States
2  30476  13.68%  29305  17.34%  431.41 GB  51.76%  Russian Federation
3  28493  12.79%  24224  14.34%   38.88 GB   4.66%  Germany
4  12620   5.66%  12234   7.24%  110.95 GB   13.31%  China
5  10483   4.70%   9133   5.41%   16.50 GB   1.98%  Great Britain (UK)
6   9945   4.46%   8960   5.30%   21.35 GB   2.56%  France
7   7842   3.52%   7061   4.18%   15.46 GB   1.85%  Poland
8   6988   3.14%   6066   3.59%   12.99 GB   1.56%  Italy
9   5570   2.50%   5104   3.02%   10.02 GB   1.20%  Netherlands
10  5290   2.37%   4891   2.89%    9.06 GB   1.09%  Canada
11  4542   2.04%   4083   2.42%    6.60 GB   0.79%  Brazil
12  3683   1.65%   3276   1.94%    5.19 GB   0.62%  Spain
13  3625   1.63%   3412   2.02%    7.28 GB   0.87%  Czech Republic
14  3547   1.59%   3162   1.87%    6.64 GB   0.80%  Ukraine
15  3292   1.48%   3043   1.80%    4.44 GB   0.53%  Japan
16  3134   1.41%   2610   1.54%    2.26 GB   0.27%  Australia
17  2696   1.21%   2348   1.39%    5.04 GB   0.60%  Hungary
18  2505   1.12%   2294   1.36%    7.18 GB   0.86%  Romania
19  2473   1.11%   2130   1.26%    4.04 GB   0.49%  Austria
20  2417   1.08%   2239   1.33%    2.44 GB   0.29%  Norway
21  2390   1.07%   2167   1.28%    4.78 GB   0.57%  Portugal
22  2276   1.02%   2121   1.26%    5.89 GB   0.71%  Sweden
23  2035   0.91%   1734   1.03%    4.97 GB   0.60%  Switzerland
24  2005   0.90%   1631   0.97%    3.09 GB   0.37%  Bulgaria
25  1863   0.84%   1634   0.97%    4.63 GB   0.55%  India
26  1681   0.75%   1512   0.89%    2.81 GB   0.34%  Belgium
27  1616   0.73%   1406   0.83%    3.37 GB   0.40%  Latvia
28  1386   0.62%   1242   0.74%    2.44 GB   0.29%  Slovak Republic
29  1227   0.55%   1146   0.68%    1.67 GB   0.20%  Korea (South)
30  1159   0.52%    998   0.59%    1.95 GB   0.23%  Israel

In the half januar 2008 the installer is downloaded about *10.000 *times 
and about *268029 *files has been downloaded.

To be able to use the kde mirror system there are currently some open 
thinks:

1. Mostly kde mirrors use the ftp protocol which isn't supported by the 
installer yet - this has to be extended

2. sourceforge mirrors do not support sub directories, which requires to 
extend the installer a bit -> I'm working on this, it will be ready in 
the 0.8.5 release of the installer

2. kde mirror directory layout:
The currently used mirrors contains several directories with kde 
unstable releases and directories for supplementary libraries and tools.
There are only the latest version of the supplementary libraries 
available which may work for win32libs but probably will give problems 
for packages in the kdesupport category because of possible api changes. 

Given the fact that installer version 0.8.5 will support flat directory 
structures I'm planing to put all required files (including the 
installer config file) for a given release on the kde mirrors into one 
subdirectory eg:

/pub/kde/unstable/3.97/windows
   -all files for 3.97 release
/pub/kde/unstable/4.1/windows
   - all files for 4.1 release

You can see an example of such structure in 
http://download.cegit.de/kde-windows/mirror-example/

Any comments ?

Ralf