Fedora Board Recap 2007-NOV-13

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Nov 21, 2007 8:02 AM, Jeroen van Meeuwen <kanarip at kanarip.com> wrote:
> Keeping old systems around doesn't sound very efficient -one goal that I
> guess is attempted to be achieved by the "keeping-only-so-many-copies of
> the sources re-generating the SRPM on demand" idea.

There several issues that need to be addressed and i think the
regenerated of srpms on demand makes headway on all of them without
speaking to the GPL licensing issue directly.

1) We as a project are producing live-cds, and encouraging people to
physically hand this out. But we are not providing source in a way
that these people can easily meet the requirements of GPLv2 if someone
receiving a physical livecd requests the corresponding sourcecode.
How do we as a project expect this to be handled currently by
ambassadors or the free media project.. or even a sitting board
member?  When I hand out a f7/f8 live cd and someone asks me for the
corresponding source what do I say as a Fedora Board member?

Are these people who are giving out physical media acting as this
project's agents or acting on their own? If the are acting as our
agents does this project have a legal responsibility to make sure they
can meet the source code distribution requirements? If they are not
acting as our agents in a legal sense, do we have an ethical
obligation to make it reasonable easy for people handing out fedora
media to meet the source distribution requirements?

Both Jesse's idea of hardlinked archive and the srpm generation on
demand will help here. But the hardlinked archive isn't going to scale
out.

2) Koji is space constrained. We are going to need to flush things
from koji quite frequently. I'm not sure we can rely on koji to be the
point at which we archive anything even srpms.  Nor do I think we have
the resources to scale jesse's big pile of archived srpms.  His idea
may scale just fine right now, but what happens a year from now when
there are 12 different active spin SIGS, each producing monthly
re-spins?  The space needed to house a hardlinked dump of all possible
'released' srpms is still an unbounded constraint.  The cvs and
lookaside space on the other hand are consuming much smaller amounts
of space currently and we can most certainly set a limit on the size
limit for the re-generated srpms cache.

3)re-generation of srpms on the fly lets us provide more than the
absolute minimum in required service.  We should be aiming to provide
source distribution for everything we've built through koji and has
been in a publicly facing repository.. including rawhide.  The big
ball of hardlinked srpms certainly can't give us source distribution
coverage that also includes everything seen in the public rawhide
tree.

-jef