[FreeBSD-Announce] FreeBSD 5.1 Released!

[Oliver Fromme]

Ken Smith wrote:
 > On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 06:24:06PM +0200, Oliver Fromme wrote:
 > > On the other hand -- When someone from the RE team posts
 > > a message to hubs@ like "5.1 for i386 available now!",
 > > I guess many people will start their sync jobs immediately.
 > > That's already some kind of "push".  So there's the same
 > > load situation, except everyone has started the thing
 > > manually, instead of having it initiated automatically.
 > 
 > Yup.  But that's arguably a "special case".  If you can fold the special
 > case into what you use for day-to-day stuff that's great.  But sometimes
 > it's best to design the system for the day-to-day stuff and leave the
 > special cases as special cases.  Depends on how often the special cases
 > come along.

That's exactly what I meant when I mentioned those two
cases.  The day-to-day stuff (i.e. syncing distfiles etc.)
doesn't have to change at all.  Heck, those don't even
have to be mirrored daily.  It works perfectly well as it
is now.  At least as far as I'm concerned.

The problem is when we're approaching a release, and the
messages on hubs@ arrive almost hourly saying that these
releases and those packages have been uploaded.  Sometimes
it is important to sync as fast as possible, because some
things have only a short lifetime anyway, such as some
release candidates.  This is where an automated "push" or
notification mechanism would be really beneficial.

By the way, yesterday (the day 5.1-release went out) was
a holiday in Germany ("Pfingstmontag"), and I guess in
other parts of the world, too.  Another reason to have an
automatism for syncing, because many people probably just
weren't there to do things manually.

Maybe I'm wrong, though.  :-)

Regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co KG, Oettingenstr. 2, 80538 München
Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author
and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way.

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