Nick Hill wrote:
By making the wiki database .MYI, .MYD and .frm files available by anonymous rsync, mirrors can sync their database to the wiki database in minutes, with relatively little data transfer (Rsync only sends the differences between the local and remote copy of the file over the network). With such a system, I can imagine lots of databased wiki mirrors pointing their edits back to the main wiki.
IIRC, the .MYI. MYD, and .frm files are not portable across platforms (and certainly not across database backends!). I'd be very leery of using them that way.
The same thing would work just as well, and be easier to implement, using rsync on an HTML tree image of Wiki.
This, however, would be ideal.
And perhaps a way to dump a static HTML tree. -- Incidentally, the total combined size of the pages in article and Wikipedia: space on the English wiki is about 172 megabytes. The upload directories bring another 134 megs;
This surprises me. I would think it closer to 400Mb. The current article database seems mostly plain text and weighs in at 404Mb without revision histories. I have viewed the database with Hexedit and less than 10% is non-text.
You're forgetting the talk pages and user pages, which I can't imagine would be included in a simple encyclopedia mirror.
we still fit on a CD-ROM uncompressed. That may not remain so, though...
The KDE Konqueror web browser can navigate and open files in a .tgz archive, but this would only be a medium-term partial solution.
There's always self-unzipping JavaScript. ;)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)