What makes a spin a Spin?

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 11:22 AM, Mike McGrath <mmcgrath at redhat.com> wrote:
>  We've talked about metrics a lot, perhaps a minimum number of downloads
>  over a certain period of time?  We could just keep the most popular spins
>  up.

I'm fine with this sort of approach as policy to help keep the tension
down when making the hard choice on what to remove from the torrent
when it comes time to make space. But I'm not sure we could be more
fine grained than release periods in terms of periods of time over
which to do metrics.  Once hosted, we might have to make a commitment
to keep that spin up for the release cycle during for which it
targets.

But we are still going to end up in situations where we have to choose
between 'new' spins that have no download track record because they
aren't on the torrent yet and 'mature' spins which have a marginal
popularity.  Or worse still, making judgments between download numbers
from our high profile torrent and an external group's jidgo or http or
whatever  server where a new spin has been hosted for a while but
hasn't yet made the cut to be on our central server.  No matter how we
do it, how to populate the finite resource of hosting space is going
to require some amount of unpopular decision making.

We simply may have to come to terms with the idea that there are tiers
of spins.  Items like the desktop spin with a broad audience may be
treated differently than the games or fel spins in terms of continuity
of being hosted on the torrent from release to release, regardless of
the popularity numbers.

-jef