Fedora Rel-Eng Meeting Recap 2007-JUN-11

[Rahul Sundaram]

Jeremy Katz wrote:

>>
>> 1) Mirrors allegedly have a problem:
>>
>> What exactly are they complaining about?
> 
> They're complaining that it erodes the value that they provide to us.
> And that if we do that, then there's a lot less reason for them to
> mirror and help us out.  

If other mirrors are more occupied then does it erode the value of the 
one mirror which is not being used as much? If I distribute the software 
via Free Media program, online or retail shops, magazines and books, 
does it erode their value? We are always going to be distributing our 
software in more than one way and if some ways are more faster or 
efficient than the rest we should do that. This seems a rather odd thing 
for a mirror to be complaining about. How many are complaining?

And they don't like that they get it mirrored
> and yet people at their institutions still end up using their _external_
> bandwidth to get the torrent early rather than accessing the local
> mirror which was explicitly set up to reduce local bandwidth
> consumption.

Is there anything stopping them from opening their local mirror within 
their institution?

> I don't think that any of the infrastructure issues will be changed at
> all.  The infrastructure issues we have at release time aren't that the
> mirrors are falling over or anything of the sort.  

We might not be particularly worried about mirrors but they do get 
saturated quickly and in short the infrastructure problems are directly 
related to many people rushing to get the new release which can 
certainly mitigated by a early torrent release.

> How is that clear?  Why can't I download from the box that's two hops
> away from me on the network and I have a gigabit connection to?

.. because the mirror is waiting to sync the content that we are pushing 
out? If they prefer the closer mirror they can very well wait for it to 
open up. Right?

   And no
> matter how clear we are, it's still going to be muddy and make things a
> lot more difficult from the standpoint of a launch with the press

How? Why would the press be bothered that we are doing a torrent only 
release 4 days earlier? Should we be more worried about the hypothetical 
confusion in press as opposed to getting the release to end users faster?

Rahul