Fedora.NEXT Products and the fate of Spins

Josh Boyer jwboyer at fedoraproject.org
Thu Jan 30 11:42:45 UTC 2014


On Jan 29, 2014 11:24 PM, "Adam Williamson" <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

Your other reply said there is no burden for spins.  Yet you list a bunch
of things you classify as a whole lot of extra work.  Including QA.  Using
lack of burden as a reason to keep it and extra burden as an excuse not to
have spin maintainers do the spins outside of Fedora doesn't wash either.

josh
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