On 08 Sep 2016, at 14:45, Sebastian Hahn sebastian@torproject.org wrote:

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On 08 Sep 2016, at 02:47, Sebastian Hahn sebastian@torproject.org wrote: as you've realized it's been taking forever to get mirror updates sent to the website, sorry for that. If there's anyone who wanted to take over, please drop me a line and I'll explain the process.

Wow! I did not expect this kind of response, a total of 8 people have indicated interested so far, and the first batch of changes has already been applied[0]. Thanks to all who wants to help, I appreciate it a lot.

Here's an email I sent to the first two people who mailed me. Hopefully it explains the process a little.

Hi there,

both of you have expressed interest for maintaining the mirror list. Thanks! I hope at least one of you will still want to do it after this short introduction, if both of you do that's fine, too :)

The website is maintained in a git repo[0]. The metadata about mirrors is stored there, along with a perl script to sanity-check them and maintain the list. The fiile include/tor-mirrors.csv contains the raw data as submitted by the operators, include/mirrors-table.wmi gets auto-generated from that file by using the update-mirrors.pl script. When running the script, it fetches a sample of files from the official website and then compares them to the files received from the mirrors. If there are any discrepancies, these are reported/excluded. The entire process is fragile and many improvements can be made, but it should work OK.

One issue that can happen is that if the perl LWP module cannot verify the certificate of https://torproject.org, all mirrors are deleted from the output file. In this case, make sure to set appropriate environment variables (these depend on the LWP version) such that certificates can be checked correctly.

What I would hope to get from you is that you take the input from people on the mailing list, put them into the csv file, make a git commit, run the script, check the result for errors, make another git commit, and then submit a patch to the git repository by creating an issue on trac[1] or sending me email directly.

Let me know if you have any questions/concerns. Thanks again! Sebastian

[0]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/project/web/webwml.git/ [1]: https://trac.torproject.org