Miror management - downloads and users

[Rahul Sundaram]

Hi


When we announced the FC6 statistics milestone of a million users, it 
was described as the amount of downloads in many places. This widespread 
confusion even internally in Red Hat is probably many software projects 
like say Firefox usually advertise their download rates. One way to 
avoid this is provide both download and user estimates except that we 
dont really have download numbers.

We could ask each of the mirrors to send us the data but that is a bit 
tedious and mirrors might not participate. A better way might be a 
mirror list designed to allow us to keep tab of the downloads. sf.net 
for example has a web page that is not a static list of mirrors but a 
web page with a round robin system. We could do something like that or 
geo ip based page which suggests the mirrors near to them. I dont think 
we would be able to know partial downloads with this but it allows us a 
more accurate estimate of much of these downloads actually translate 
into users. Comments?

Rahul