Fedora.NEXT Products and the fate of Spins

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2014-01-29 at 18:17 -0700, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:

> 
> 1) Disk space. Disks are not cheap in the world of data-access ready
> disks. The 4 TB SATAs sound nice but when you try serving FTP off them
> you find that you have to raid more than you did of the expensive SAS
> disks and your effective amount of disk space you can use is in the
> range of 1-10% of the disk space before you end up losing to speed of
> access, time to send, and general disk drive latency. After that you
> have to replace the disks quite often as they fail much sooner than
> any manufacturer says they will.
> 
> 
> 2) Our disk space goal for mirrors is 1 TB of disk space for the main
> releases. That means N-1, N, and N+1 (alpha/beta/release).  We skim
> that and every iso, architecture, and extra makes it harder to keep.
> 
> 
> 3) Net access. Large file sharing (500+ MB iso)  costs more than small
> file sharing (rpms). It takes up  'streams' for longer in modern
> routers/firewalls and thus you can fill up your pipe without
> saturating your pipe. This used to be gotten around via various file
> sharing mechanisms but these are increasingly getting shut down at the
> ISP and Universities for any content. 
> 
> 
> 4) Many mirrors skip the spins. That means the cost gets eaten up by
> those that do and then they run into the top issues above which makes
> it more likely they don't want to mirror them.
> 
> 
> These are costs that all the mirrors have to pay on this and those are
> things that are 'hidden' when people think 'oh we can make another
> spin, it only takes me an hour to spin it up and test it.' 
> 
> 
> By the way, I am not anti-spin and consider the above costs to be
> things that can't be paid now or in the future.. I am just wanting
> people to realize that even beyond releng/qa resources this is not a
> 'freebie'.

Of course, another way of looking at this is to see that all these
things are the work we would be downloading onto several disparate
groups, who would almost certainly not be capable of doing it as well
and efficiently as Fedora releng is, if we decided to wash our hands of
spins.

jwb has tried to characterize this as an 'opportunity' for spins, but I
really don't think that washes. It's much more a case of us dumping a
whole lot of extra work onto any who wants to maintain a spin:

* Get a domain
* Get a proper SSL cert for your domain
* Figure out a build process - hack up some scripts which inevitably
grow into a baroque horror? Deploy your own koji?
* Figure out a QA process (we have provided a QA process for spins; this
cost us - well, me, personally - a few hours I was happy to spend
several releases ago, and it's in place and it works)
* Cover the costs of hosting, or convince someone to distribute your
bits
* Do all your own marketing
* Somehow try to make sure that tools like liveusb-creator include your
bits

I'm not sure I can imagine a spin maintainer who would be *happy* about
all this.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net