A few people, i.e. at least two, have come into #paludis to ask for help with fetching distfiles. Their specific problem is that the computer they want to update doesn’t have a fast connection to the internet, so they want to generate a list of files to download, take it to another machine that does have a relatively fast connection, download the files, and take them home again.

The usual answer these poor people receive is that they should upgrade their internets. Sometimes, they are told that the mysterious “dleverton” is thinking about possibly maybe one day writing a client that may achieve their goal for them. Today, I have made their dreams reality, with the world’s worst ruby script.

Run the script with just one target, and theoretically it will send to the files you need to download, in the format:

filename,download_location_1,download_location_2,…

The script is still in its first draft form, but it should work, and I may update it to be less stupid, to bind to more paludis source (rather than just copying it to ruby) and to have more polite variable names. To use it you will need paludis-scm installed, as I only commited the mirrors binding stuff today.

Good luck, you’ll need it.