Fedora ftp site?

[George Garvey]

On Sun, Mar 21, 2004 at 06:35:57PM -0500, Alan Cox wrote:
> And many mirrors dont have the disk space
> to keep two copies for an instant switch. I dont actually think it will be
> that big a deal except during test releases where change rates are high,
> although up2date's inability to handle failover nicely does not help

   Respectfully, Alan, this must be from no experience, just as an idea
(the infamous SHOULD). I doubt you've even been in the position of someone
with an FC1 box, updating it from rawhide; and therefore don't know what
you're talking about from experience. (Of course, I may be wrong, and that
is a data point: it works under some conditions, and not others, but that
fact doesn't seem to be being investigated, either.)
   You may not think it, but a lot of us are experiencing it.
   Ignore the issues with rawhide that everyone says are what one deserves
for doing that. That is accepted as a given.
   The up2date and yum issues have been outrageous. It IS a big deal. It is
not just failover. It is bad files that up2date somehow doesn't notice are
bad until AFTER it has failed to install them. Just a few minutes ago, the
fact that SysVinit was installed was removed from the rpm data base on one
system. rpm --rebuilddb still didn't know that SysVinit was installed. All
because up2date failed and quit in the middle, because it (apparently) had
downloaded a bad copy of gnome-vfs2. So now, no more updates for SysVinit,
ever again, unless one notices what happened. That is just the latest of
many, many unexpected behaviours from up2date. (Turned out to be a lot more
missing than SysVinit, by the way.) (I don't know much about yum, because I
gave up on it quite a while back.)
   It is constantly repeated, "use mirrors" to solve problems with
connecting to download.redhat. Then in other posts you see, from the same
people, "the mirrors are broken and not in sync, haven't been for
days/weeks." If the mirrors can't access download.redhat, how are we
supposed to?
   I don't want to access download.redhat. Willing to use a mirror. But
that's not always possible: one just doesn't know which mirrors are worth
using this time, and sometimes everyone I try is broken.
   I doubt very much that I'll be doing any testing for FC3. There is no
infrastructure for it that works consistently, and that doesn't seem to be
being addressed. Dealing with the other issues would be acceptable. Adding
this frustration on top of it is too much. I believe I'll just become a
parasite and install FC2, and get updates to FC2.
   I know. No one will miss me. But I don't understand what is motivating
otherwise intelligent people to keep saying there is no problem.
   If the problem is that hard to fix, that otherwise intelligent people
have to claim that it doesn't exist rather than deal with it, why not just
say that it is too difficult and no one will be fixing it due to lack of
time to work on it?
   It is just possible, if the problem were actually acknowledged and
investigated and specified, that someone with the time WOULD fix it. It has
happened before.

   It is very bizarre. Help us test. But we won't help you be able to test.
Seems a bit schizophrenic from here. It really does get one to wondering
what is actually going on, because this can't possibly make sense without
some hidden datum to put it into perspective.
   I don't like to rant and complain. I was very surprised, though, to see
someone whose views I've come to respect almost denying that the situation
exists. I just have no way to make sense out of what is going on.
Apparently, I'm not alone in that position, from the torrent of complaints,
and the quality of responses.