"Action Items" From FUDCon?

[Matt Domsch]

On Sun, Jan 13, 2008 at 06:28:55PM -0600, Mike McGrath wrote:
> Can anyone think of any action items the infrastructure team (or others
> for that matter) may need to do as a result of discussions during
> hackfest/fudcon?


Lots of little things came out of discussions I was in.  Not all are
action items, just to ponder.


* MirrorManager mirrorlist needs to be able to provide the list of mirrors _by
  protocol_.  e.g append &proto={http,ftp,rsync}  to get back the list of rsync
  mirrors.  Should be easy enough for me to add.  Unity folks want
  this.

* Promote/rebrand the Rescue ISO into the "Fedora Network-based
  Installer".  Needs trivial change (clumens will make) to use default
  path download.fp.o/pub/fedora/....  This will allow users to get
  started installing or upgrading by downloading only ~100MB instead
  of ~700MB.  Debate fate of boot.iso which lets people get started by
  downloading only 8MB, knowing they need to download another 92MB
  stage2 immediately during install too.

* follow-up - teach anaconda loader to parse a mirrorlist instead of
  using a single default path.  This provides better failover
  capability and lets users choose which mirror they want.

* follow-up - anaconda doesn't have a way to mimic yum Ctrl-C to jump
  to the next mirror in the mirrorlist in case you've hit a dud/slow
  mirror.  Would be nice to have.

* yum-avahi plugin, and some form of sharing.  Think avahi query 'who
  has foo-0.1.3-1.i386.rpm in your yum cache?', get back answers, and
  download from that local user.  Repo metadata could be done
  likewise (it too is signed after all).

* UEFI support is shaping up thanks to PeterJ.  Now to finish that in
  time for F9.

* DaveJ had some good ideas for disabling unneeded syncs
  during install (e.g. remount / as ext2 during install - no
  reason to journal then, and mount as ext3 afterwards).  Fix rpm so
  it doesn't fsync() after writing each file to disk.  Also fix the
  syslogd so it doesn't fsync() after each line when writing out the
  logs during bootup.


* Mock has gotten faster recently - enough so that we could probably
  throw lots more builds at our build systems.  One fallout is that
  when a in the dependency tree changes, we could have koji kick off
  scratch builds of all applications later in the dependency tree, to
  discover compile-time breakage of those later applications.  This
  would let us catch these earlier.  Some people do this already
  themselves manually - I'm saying integrate it into koji. (If we need
  to add more build servers, we can investigate.)


* With the re-invigorated marketing push, look for ways to get
  additional sponsorship and to integrate sponsors into the Fedora
  community (as opposed to merely asking for money).

* Improve Packaging around software licenses to more automate checking
  for license compatibility (two apps separately licensed - are their
  licenses compatible...)


-Matt