visibility of release process

[Ken Smith]

On Tue, 2008-12-09 at 15:19 -0600, Kevin Day wrote:

[ Other points were not ignored, just nothing to really say about them
other than "Yes" and/or "Will try", etc. ]

> * More notice to hubs@ before the release notes are generated. The  
> releases always come with a "At the time of this writing, these  
> mirrors have the full distribution" list. If it was announced to us  
> mirror operators before that list is made, we could make sure we were  
> synced in time to be included. Maybe even a semi-shaming of "These  
> mirrors do not appear to have the required bits:". The difference in  
> bandwidth we see on our public mirror (ftp3.us) is pretty extreme if  
> we're listed there or not, which seems to be a 50/50 coin-toss on the  
> last few releases. I'm honestly not sure why, since we can easily pull  
>  >50mbps from ftp-master.

I have absolutely no clue how to fairly handle what needs to be done
with this so, as you noted, its something of a coin toss at the moment.

The issue is that the Release Announcement needs to include a list of
FTP sites, but the list can't be "too long" (as in can't be every mirror
site we've got).  The Release Announcement should be relatively short
and to the point.  An exhaustive list of every mirror is a bit too much
in that regard.  Ideally we'd just say "Its available on a mirror site,
get it from there.".  But people want easy so we need to include
something to click on.  With the 7.0 release I tried giving just the URL
of the primary site (ftp.freebsd.org) but that proved people don't just
want easy - they're lazy.  For the most part they just clicked on that
and didn't look around for a mirror.  Hence your observation about the
difference in bandwidth when you're listed versus when you're not
listed.

Since we don't have any sort of "click here and automagically land on a
nice fast mirror real close to you" I basically make a quick survey of
some FTP sites shooting for having several of the primary mirror sites
(ftpX.freebsd.org) and a sampling of geographically diverse country
mirrors (ftpX.au.freebsd.org, ftpX.ru.freebsd.org, etc.).  If you're one
of the ones I check and if you've got the right sparc64 checksum file
(I'm looking for sites that carry everything, and since sparc64 is
usually the last to get loaded on ftp-master ...) you make the list.

Sorry, I know it sucks.  Until we've got something automagic I'm not
quite sure how to fairly handle having a list that's not "too long" for
a release announcement but still providing a reasonable starting point
for people who want something to click on in the release announcement.

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

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