Coordinating and distributing the release

[Lukas Ertl]

On Sat, 31 May 2003, Scott Long wrote:

> After 5.0 we discussed ways to coordinate the release so that iso images
> could fully propogate to the mirrors before before they were available
> to the public.  However, I'm not sure if a decision was ever made.  Is
> this still a reasonable goal?

I would say yes, and not just for the ISOs, but also for the complete
release tree. So people can't jump the gun and shout "hey, 5.1 is out"
(can you say "slashdot"?) before it is released officially.

> Can it be done using unix file permissions?

I guess so. The RedHat mirrors use this scheme. They rsync from one master
server, where you have to be registered, and they set their directory
permissions to 0700 and flip the bit when the release is out. (The exact
time when this will happen is announced on the mailing list.) Of course,
this only works if the owner of the files is different from the ftpd user.

> Another idea that came to mind in talking with others is investigating
> using BitTorrent to augment the distribution of iso images.  For those

Actually, I guess I won't use BitTorrent, although it sounds interesting.
I'm happy with the performance that we get from ftp-master.cz, and as soon
as the files are there I can have them within half an hour.

Other mirrors are welcome to use us as upstream servers.

regards,
le

-- 
Lukas Ertl                             eMail: l.ertl at univie.ac.at
UNIX-Systemadministrator               Tel.:  (+43 1) 4277-14073
Zentraler Informatikdienst (ZID)       Fax.:  (+43 1) 4277-9140
der Universität Wien                   http://mailbox.univie.ac.at/~le/