Automated Mirror Selection [Re: Worst experience with Up2Date ever.]

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Thu, 30 Sep 2004 10:24:08 -0400, fulko.hew at sita.aero
<fulko.hew at sita.aero> wrote:
> In this case I was complaining about a blatently 'dead' site, and to
> the best of my knowledge, has never worked since it was added to the
> master list.  I know its manual, but the list of hosts that the master site
> maintains (and distributes) could easily, manually, be updated to remove
> this entry.  One person, one time, 15 seconds, and the community would
> have one less thing to grip about.  Give me access to that site, and I'll
> do it!

You want a dead site removed from the default mirror list? Is that all you want?
Have you filed a bug in bugzilla about it? Because the only way to get
any bugs fixed..is to get bugs filed in bugzilla. Getting a known dead
mirror dropped from a list.. takes 15 seconds for you as a user to
file as a bug report to inform the up2date package maintainer about. 
But you talked about much more than just getting known dead sites
removed from statically created manually maintained lists.

> You can laugh all you want, but that makes you part of the problem
> and not part of the solution.  I'm sorry if you are not open to
> constructive criticism.

This isn't constructive. But if you want to be constructive I will
give you some homework.
You go to the official mirror list, contact each mirror list admin on
the list currently.
Ask them politely ask if they would be willing to implement new PITA
script logic that is fedora specific to communicate back to a
centralized server and see how many mirror admins are willing to do
it.  To a lot of mirror admins, fedora is just one of many ftp/rsync
trees that they mirror, and implementing special script logic just for
fedora is not something they want to do just to be listed on a list.
The hard issue is not technical..there are technical solutions... its
not hard to dream one up... its not hard to implement a proof of
concept.  The hard issue is political. You have to get mirror admins
to agree to use fedora's special PITA script logic if you implement
it. Please, by all means, start communicating with the mirror admins
and get them to agree to implement special script logic.

But as I have suggested... the best way forward..before we start
DEMANDING mirrors to use new script logic..is for someone in the
community... to implement a proof of concept service and start getting
mirror admins who are willing to test/use the service to be apart of
the testing. I'm quite sure if you started screwing around with a
service that attempted to provide a dynamic mirrorlist to use that
could accurately describe which mirrors were in sync with the master
mirror, you would find one or two mirror admins who would be willing
to help and you certaintly would find community willing to use it. But
any discussion that starts with demanding mirror admins to do anything
extra to be listed... is a non-starter. The hard part is political,
and you aren't going to win political points by demanding new policies
on the mirror admins.  Are you willing to drop 80% of the mirror list
by demanding specialized script logic? There is no point i demand a
technical solution that mirror admins aren't going to use.

> Compared to the bandwidth used to actually mirror the sites, and to supply
> the mirror to the world, the notification process is a trial amount of
> bandwidth or effort.

Fine.. build a server and a service and the mirror side scripts and
offer it for community to test. Demanding red hat build this and
demanding mirror admins to use this doesn't get us anywhere faster. 
So, i await your email to fedora-list advertising your new dynamic
mirror list service for up2date. I can't wait to test it.

-jef