Hi all,

I'm happy to announce that we have a public, read-only Squeaksource mirror up and running at the Universidad de Chile. The URL is: http://www.dsal.cl/squeaksource/ TECHNICAL DETAILS BELOW. Feel free to broadcast this announcement!

MOTIVATION:
For us, Switzerland is a long way and the connection to Squeaksource has always been painfully slow. We've set up this mirror to help to address this, and I imagine that it will be of use not only for the Chileans but also other countries in latin america, which is why I am announcing it here.

ITS TRANSPARENT:
I've worked out a way to make the use of this mirror transparent when using Pharo 1.3: you just use monticello as always, and have a setting to redirect loads from Squeaksource to wherever you want. I have successfully loaded Moose and Seaside from the mirror using this package, so it should work for you. And I can tell you, it was blazingly fast: Seaside loaded in 5m45, and most of the time was spent compiling ... ;-)

So try the mirror and the package out, send me your comments, we want to work on this to make Squeaksource a better experience for everybody.

HOW TO USE from Pharo 1.3:
- Get the redirection package from http://www.squeaksource.com/MonticelloRedirect
- To load from the mirror instead of from Squeaksource, do-it of the following:
MRManager redirectFrom: 'http://www.squeaksource.com/' to: 'http://www.dsal.cl/squeaksource/'.
- To remove this redirection: MRManager removeFrom: 'http://www.squeaksource.com/'.
- See comments of MRManager for more info. MRManager list can be useful at some times.
- Only 2 classes, < 10 methods, not counting accessors. The trick is the use of MethodWrappers.
- I did not test this in Squeak or other versions of Pharo. Feel free to try it out in your environment and send me patches if needed.
- There is no UI, contributions are welcome!!

DETAILS ON THE MIRROR
- It's a full copy of Squeaksource, updated daily.
- The mirror is read-only: if you want to make a commit you still have to do it in Squeaksource. This is to avoid all the complications of distributed writes.
- Updates happen once a day, before midnight Chilean time. Updates take typically (up till now) 200 minutes (!), average download speed here is 200KB/s :-(
- The Squeaksource team has been so kind as to provide a list of the packages that are in Squeaksource, refreshed daily and we pass this to wget (with some massaging of the data inbetween).
- The Squeaksource list of packages is available here: http://scg.unibe.ch/download/SSProjectList/projectList.txt
- The software that does the mirror is available here: https://github.com/vramiro/easy-wget-mirror

MANY THANKS TO:
- Daniel Galdames for doing the original mirroring tests
- Victor Ramiro for taking Daniels' work and putting it in production
- The Squeaksource team for providing the daily list of packages, especially Fabrizio Perin and Mircea Lungu
- You for trying it out and telling us about it!

---> Save our in-boxes! http://emailcharter.org <---

Johan Fabry   
jfabry at dcc.uchile.cl - http://dcc.uchile.cl/~jfabry
PLEIAD Lab - Computer Science Department (DCC) - University of Chile