article.sgml - Formalize Requirements?

[Ken Smith]

As part of updating article.sgml should I formalize the requirements
to become an Official Mirror Site?  I already know opinions on that
vary and depend at least a little bit on exactly what the requirements
are so I'm going to make a mini-proposal to try and focus any
discussion that comes of this a little bit.  I also realize hubs@
doesn't reach all the mirror admins, I'd need to use the cataloging
effort as a means to reach some of the mirror admins.

This will be vague, just enough to give you an idea of where we could
go with it.  If you think it's a horrible idea let us know.  I'll
interpret silence as you think it's a good idea and/or you want to see
more detail before commenting (or you just don't care :-).

First it might be time to set some requirements made of all Official
Mirror Sites.  With releases being staged now if it will not offend
too many of the existing mirror sites it might be time to require
split uids (different uid does sync than anonymous ftp).  It's a new
issue so we'd need to be careful but at the same time there are issues
if we don't do this (I already knew a few, the talk with re@ about the
Release Guide added a few some of which are actually in your best
interest :-).

The other thing I'd suggest we do is formalize the tiering structure a
little bit.  Tier-1's sync from an ftp-master (we currently have
three) and carry everything.  Tier-2's either don't sync from an
ftp-master or they don't carry everything (or both).  Requirements on
Tier-2's would be minimal (e.g. most current releases of at least one
architecture type thing) but they'd need to satisfy the above
mentioned requirements placed on all sites.

Thoughts?

I'll summarize the stuff that has come from the Release Guide being
looked at by re@ later.  Right now it's mostly them teaching me stuff
and me teaching them stuff - just a couple email exchanges with
questions.

-- 
						Ken Smith
- From there to here, from here to      |       kensmith at cse.buffalo.edu
  there, funny things are everywhere.   |
                      - Theodore Geisel |