Re: pkg (aka pkgng) 1.0 released

On 7 September 2012 13:54, Matthew Seaman
<m.seaman_at_infracaninophile.co.uk> wrote:
> On 09/07/12 12:30, Ivan Voras wrote:
>> On 06/09/2012 18:44, Matthew Seaman wrote:
>>> On 06/09/2012 16:37, Ivan Voras wrote:
>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> It looks like the pkg port installs pkg.conf.sample with the line:
>>>>
>>>> PACKAGESITE         : http://pkg.freebsd.org/${ABI}/latest
>>>>
>>>> ... which is finally a good step in the direction of making pkgng
>>>> working by default, except that the "pkg.freebsd.org" site doesn't exist
>>>> in DNS. Instead, pkgbeta.freebsd.org still exists. I suppose one should
>>>> be a DNS CNAME for the other?
>>>
>>> It's a SRV record:
>>>
>>> seedling:~:% dig +short IN SRV _http._tcp.pkg.freebsd.org
>>> 10 10 80 pkgbeta.FreeBSD.org.
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> What are the benefits of doing it this way?
>
> Yeah -- it's a bit OTT right now given there's just the one publicly
> available pkg repository available.  It will pay off later when there
> are more pkg repositories available -- repositories can be added to (or
> removed from) the list in the SRV record without end-users having to
> know the details.
>
> It may also be possible to replicate what portupdate has done and use
> geolocation based services to steer end users to a nearby repository
> site automatically.

Ok, but all that can be done the "normal" way with A records.

As far as I can tell, the intended benefits of the SRV record system
is to disentangle services and hosts, so that, e.g. the same
user-visible DNS name (e.g. "pkg.freebsd.org") resolves to a different
host if asked for the HTTP service and the FTP service.

I suppose this could work in FreeBSD's case if the record was created
differently, instad of the "normal" _http._tcp record, introduce a new
one, e.g. _pkgng._tcp, so when a web browser visits "pkg.freebsd.org"
it gets a regular web page or some other user-visible content, and the
specially made pkg client will resolve it to another service and
another (possibly) server. This also can be done without the SRV
record, by e.g. inspecting client's HTTP headers.

I'm not saying that the SRV record is technically wrong in this case,
I just don't see how is it useful (and surely there will be others
trying to ping "pkg.freebsd.org" and complaining when it fails to
resolve).