Mirroring anything meant knowing a repository existed, knowing which of its
thirty files were the weights, and assembling a resolve URL by hand. The mirror
page had a text box for that URL and no way to find one.
It now searches Hugging Face and lists a repository's weight files with their
sizes and published checksums, each with a button that fills the fetch form.
Only weight files. A repository is mostly a README and a tokenizer, and listing
those buries the four entries somebody came for.
The size shown is the LFS size, not the plain one. For an LFS-stored file —
every weights file — the plain field is the size of the pointer, so the other
one reports a gigabyte model as 133 bytes, and that is the number somebody
would then plan disk against.
The source URL is pinned to the commit the listing came from rather than to a
branch, so what the mirror fetches is what was on screen. A repository
re-uploaded under the same branch otherwise leaves two different sets of
weights with identical provenance and no way to tell them apart. The version
defaults to that revision for the same reason.
The registry's own failures are reported on their own line. It is somebody
else's server on the other side of the internet, and it being down says nothing
about the mirror — which is what the page is for and has to keep working
regardless. With no registry configured there is no search box at all, rather
than one that can only time out.
Gating decodes from a bool or a string, because the field is documented as the
first and is the second in practice: strict decoding fails the whole response,
so one gated model would hide the other nineteen in a page of results.
And a bug this made obvious: downloads were keyed by model and version, so the
second shard of a sharded model was refused as "already fetching" until the
first had finished. A fifteen-shard model had to be pulled one file at a time,
each waiting on the last. Keyed by file now — which is what the single-flight
was ever protecting, since the race is two writers on one .part. A version made
of several files reports as the worst of them: it is not present until every
shard is, and one shard failing makes the version unusable however many others
arrived.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
