Fedora Rel-Eng Meeting Recap 2007-JUN-11

[Jeremy Katz]

On Tue, 2007-06-12 at 21:44 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> 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?

No, but in all of those cases, people aren't going and using bandwidth
to the world as opposed to local bandwidth.  Also, they're fine with
torrent being available, but making it available _EARLIER_ is the
problem.

> 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?

So, they have to set up special access restriction for Fedora content
for a space of a small number of days?  This just isn't going to happen.
Or, they'll open to the world -- "the bits are available officially
anyway, why shouldn't I make my copy available".  And then we look
really stupid because we're just saying "no, you can't download it from
us yet."

> > 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.

No, it just changes when people rush.

> > 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 we could very well get rid of this confusion and awfulness by not
opening one mode of distribution sooner than every other one.

>    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?

Because press wants to be able have articles published on what we claim
is our release day.  And having the official torrent available but not
the official mirrors available is guaranteed to be a source of confusion
and trouble.

Jeremy