Jigdo - A Professional Letter to Mike McGrath

[Jonathan Steffan]

On Mon, 10 Dec 2007 17:55:47 -0500
Michael DeHaan <mdehaan at redhat.com> wrote:

> Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
> > Mike McGrath wrote:
> >>>  and we were going to
> >>>> judge jigdo a success if a certain % (compared to bittorrent)
> >>>> use jigdo.  What % would that be?
> >>>
> >>> Jigdo would in this case be particularly useful to those with a 
> >>> local mirror as they have 99% of the content already (90% if you 
> >>> have F9T3?). Because it is particularly useful to some, and 
> >>> completely weird and strange for others, the number of users that 
> >>> will use it if BitTorrent is an alternative wouldn't be a very
> >>> good indicator to see if it is actually a viable distribution
> >>> method for the whole of Fedora, neither is it the goal for these
> >>> proposals.
> >>
> >> I'm talking specifically about people going to the get-fedora page 
> >> and clicking on the torrent link vs the jigdo link.  Out of every
> >> 100 people, how many people will click on the jigdo link?
> >> 
> Jigdo did not seem to be very popular among anyone I talked to once
> they figured out the minimal install images were available.

I will admit, our poll on spins.fedoraunity.org showed that more users
want to use BitTorrent. I still think these users just had no concept
of what Jigdo is *good* at and were left to deal with our growing pains
setting everything up. We do apologize for that. We do, however, 110%
support Jigdo in many cases:

* Testing images can easily be "upgraded" to the next release, only
downloading what has changed
* Re-Spins: The same goes for Re-Spins, an end users (and the testers)
can easily "update" their ISO, again, only having to download what has
changed
* Any Spin: Not all mirrors chose to carry the ISO images. A next-hop
or local mirror might not be available with the ISO images for direct
download. This very close mirror will be able to be used to "put
together" the ISO image and with our awesome new MirrorManager the
acquisition of this data source will be automatic.
* Bandwidth Optimization/Utilization: We are able to utilize mirrors
around the globe without requiring mirror admins to think twice about
hosting Jigdo data, they already are hosting most of the data needed to
put the image back together and have to install no additional software
(as in the case of running a torrent seed.)
* Official Releases: This "letter" was directed at requesting all
updates be archived in some form; this bullet is about official
releases. These official releases will *always* be able to be hosted
via Jigdo with *very little* additional storage requirements because
the Fedora and Everything trees that were composed against are exploded
and hosted indefinitely.

Please do understand that some of our ambitions are based around
releasing an optimized, and if need-be completely rewritten, client that
will solve a lot of the issues people have had with Jigdo in the past.
The only client I know of that works is jigdo-lite and that is just a
shell script. We currently are maintaining backwards compatibility with
the existing Jigdo concept (pyjigdo being basically just a wrapper) but
might find we need to take it to the next level due to needs outside of
the scope of the original Jigdo and my plan has been to implement full
compatibility in pure python and then add new bells and whistles that
can be switched on and off, depending on the source .jigdo definition.

-- 
Jonathan Steffan
daMaestro
GPG Fingerprint: 93A2 3E2F DC26 5570 3472 5B16 AD12 6CE7 0D86 AF59