Re: [9fans] 2 newbe questions of a general nature

["Russ Cox" <rsc@swtch.com>]

> Would be nice if the BL overlords could avoid this, maybe by moving
> the previous day ISO before the new one takes its place, similar to
> how replica moves foo to _foo.

It already does that (maybe the overlords aren't as dumb as you think).
But if the HTTP download gets interrupted after a new file has been
dropped in its place, a client retrying the HTTP request will see
the new file.  If your download is not interrupted, then it will get
a consistent file.

Even if you are getting interrupted, the CD is at most 100MB
compressed, which is only 5 hours at 56kbps, so you've got plenty
of time to grab it in the 24-hour window.

Further, I doubt very much that this is the cause of people with
broken ISO images.  You can't get that far if you get half of one
download and half of another.  They're compressed, and the checksum
will fail during decompression even if the web browser doesn't notice
that the file changed in the second request.  So you'd end up with a
broken .bz2 file, not a broken image.  If you ever get to a .iso file,
it will be intact.

Russ