[Fedora TeX Live] f17 texlive repository broken?

[Andrew McNabb]

José Matos <jamatos at ...> writes:
> 
> I suspect that it could be a transient behaviour due to the latest
> packages update.
> 
> Probably you were unlucky and updated during a small window when the
> metadata was inconsistent, at least I remember other cases where the
> failure reason was this.

I experienced this problem, too, and the window was quite large. I refreshed
the directory index[1] and noticed that package timestamps were being updated
one at a time (in alphabetical order). It's hard to say exactly what the
window was, but the repo was down for starting at at least 10:00 am local
time, and by 5:00 pm, it was still at "tex-lshort". I'm guessing the total
downtime was probably around 15 to 20 hours.

Are updates happening over rsync?  If so, would it be possible in the future
to use the "--delay-updates" option, which would minimize this problem?

[1] http://jnovy.fedorapeople.org/texlive/2012/packages.fc17/