[csw-maintainers] Magic Cookie for catalogs

[Dagobert Michelsen]

Hi,

Am 02.10.2011 um 16:44 schrieb Ben Walton:
> Excerpts from Maciej (Matchek) Bliziński's message of Sun Oct 02 09:42:06 -0400 2011:
> 
>> I tried to think of a coherent scheme and couldn't.
> 
> The goal is detecting stale catalogs, right?  If so, we need two
> things.
> 
> 1. The ability to locate catalogs by some unique string.
> 2. The ability to see if it's stale when we locate it.
> 
> The first can be accomplished by some embeded hash.  We could use the
> md5sum of a package that is glacial (CSWcommon) or one that we change
> with some defined frequency (maybe CSWpki if we start rotating keys
> for every named release?).
> 
> Once we can locate the catalogs, the embedded time stamp should be
> enough to detect a mirror that is not pulling frequently enough.
> 
> Alternately, we could use two md5sums to detect stale catalogs.  The
> first should be an old md5sum (CSWcommon) and the second a newly
> added/updated package md5sum.  The second could be determined
> dynamically at the time of the check by comparing REV= stamps and
> picking something that is within the time window of what we'd consider
> a current mirror.  A fresh mirror should have both of these hashes.  A
> stale mirror would have only one.
> 
> Would this work?

Sounds reasonable. What I would like to do it to use some kind of search
API like this:
  http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/apis/websearch/
and genearate the list of found mirror candidates for me so I don't need to
do everything manually. However, the above is deprecated. Has anyone experience
with the new search API?


Best regards

  -- Dago