[Fedora-packaging] Re: paragraph on shipping static numerical libs

[Axel Thimm]

On Tue, May 29, 2007 at 10:58:54AM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le Mar 29 mai 2007 10:40, Axel Thimm a écrit :
> > On Tue, May 29, 2007 at 10:05:20AM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> >> Le Lun 28 mai 2007 23:32, Axel Thimm a écrit :
> >> > And how did that single admin get 1000 systems that are obviously
> >> > similar enough to be managed by a single person? Maybe because the
> >> > budget allowed to buy a rather homegeneous pile of hardware?
> >>
> >> Planning. You only buy systems from the same shortlist several years
> >> on a row because you know the maintenance burden associated with new
> >> configs overweights their short-term advantages (that also gives you
> >> volumes to negociate prices with hardware vendors).
> >
> > But in serious number crunching the decision of hardware planning is
> > not left to the IT staff, but the project managers themselves.
> 
> So what? You complain about overly small IT budgets, and then you say
> the people who choose the hardware don't consult the people that know
> how much it'll cost to run it? Do I need to draw you a picture?

Well, for one I'm just quoting facts, no more, no less. And yes, the
people evaluating mips/$ are not the IT staff (because they usually
don't even understand what the code does and how to find out where the
mips could be improved). You get scientists benchmarking the systems
with tuned gcc or assembly to see how the platfomr fits their
numerical calculus.

And once the system is found that will provide the nuerics for the
next 5-7 years the IT staff has to support it. AT that point it time
it doesn't matter if it will be running FC4, RHEL, SLES, Altrix or a
non-Linux environment.

So, sitting as the IT staff manager on the other side and planning to
deploy F7 everywhere is not going to work. You only get to choose the
desktops and perhaps a smallish cluster. It's different in
experimental groups - there you get more power as an IT admin.

I'm not making this up, that's what I'm seeing in the last 18 years in
phys/chem (and it certainly wasn't better before that).

The question is will Fedora just say "we don't care, your IT
management model sucks", or will it try to keep this group happy? I
think it sounds more like the former, but whatever it is, we don't
really have to fight over their IT management system: Whether it
actually fits the surroundings or could be improved, we're not going
to change it, we're just either supporting it or not.
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/packaging/attachments/20070529/28e97349/attachment.bin