Date:        Tue, 30 Sep 2003 14:42:45 -0400 (EDT)
    From:        "Greg A. Woods" <woods@weird.com>
    Message-ID:  <m1A4PSP-000B1TC@proven.weird.com>

  | Huh?  How do you figure that?  Distfiles come from the third-party
  | package authors and _MUST_ be identical no matter which packaging system
  | they're used with!

No, some make available both bz2 and gz versions of the same basic
distciof (since the bzip is smaller, and hence usually better, but
not everyone has bzip).   There are probably still some places that
still make .Z's available as well.

  | It would seem to me that such co-ordination would be downright trivial
  | and in reality it's not critical anyway since we're only talking about
  | mirror archives -- if some disagreement arises then the only fallout
  | until it's resolved is that the user doing the build has to fetch the
  | source from the original site, not one of the distfiles mirror sites.

It makes a difference to sites that create their own local mirrors,
for their various local users (of different OSs), which I think is
the most important point.

kre