Fedora Rel-Eng Meeting Recap 2007-JUN-11

[Jeremy Katz]

On Tue, 2007-06-12 at 21:19 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> John Poelstra wrote:
> > == Early Torrent Release - Rahul Sundaram ==
> >  * explore possibility of doing early torrent releases.
> >  * See IRC log for discussion of pros and cons and affect on mirrors
> > Decision: Investigate with Infrastructure team ways of getting more 
> > mirrors to participate in seeding the torrent (early?).  Do not release 
> > torrent to general public before the agreed upon coordinated release 
> > date/time.
> 
> Seeding the torrent early solves one part of the problem (ie) the 
> torrent being initially slow but the disadvantages isn't clear to me 
> reading the IRC conversations.
> 
> 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.  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.

> 2) It only makes the torrent available 4 days earlier:
> 
> I don't see how
> this is a disadvantage. We have the bits available ready and the first 
> few days rush and resulting infrastructure issues will certainly be 
> reduced by encouraging the usage of the torrent as soon as the bits are 
> ready to be mirrored. So when you open up the ISO images to the mirrors 
> make it available in the torrent.

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.  

> 3) We are "breaking" a coordinated release and users will get confused:
> 
> If we make a announcement clearly saying that it is a early torrent 
> release and other ftp/http mirrors will be available when the images are 
> synced 4 days later then the confusion should be minimum or non-existent.

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?  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

Jeremy