On Nov 21, 2007 8:02 AM, Jeroen van Meeuwen <kanarip@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Keeping old systems around doesn't sound very efficient -one goal that I > guess is attempted to be achieved by the "keeping-only-so-many-copies of > the sources re-generating the SRPM on demand" idea. There several issues that need to be addressed and i think the regenerated of srpms on demand makes headway on all of them without speaking to the GPL licensing issue directly. 1) We as a project are producing live-cds, and encouraging people to physically hand this out. But we are not providing source in a way that these people can easily meet the requirements of GPLv2 if someone receiving a physical livecd requests the corresponding sourcecode. How do we as a project expect this to be handled currently by ambassadors or the free media project.. or even a sitting board member? When I hand out a f7/f8 live cd and someone asks me for the corresponding source what do I say as a Fedora Board member? Are these people who are giving out physical media acting as this project's agents or acting on their own? If the are acting as our agents does this project have a legal responsibility to make sure they can meet the source code distribution requirements? If they are not acting as our agents in a legal sense, do we have an ethical obligation to make it reasonable easy for people handing out fedora media to meet the source distribution requirements? Both Jesse's idea of hardlinked archive and the srpm generation on demand will help here. But the hardlinked archive isn't going to scale out. 2) Koji is space constrained. We are going to need to flush things from koji quite frequently. I'm not sure we can rely on koji to be the point at which we archive anything even srpms. Nor do I think we have the resources to scale jesse's big pile of archived srpms. His idea may scale just fine right now, but what happens a year from now when there are 12 different active spin SIGS, each producing monthly re-spins? The space needed to house a hardlinked dump of all possible 'released' srpms is still an unbounded constraint. The cvs and lookaside space on the other hand are consuming much smaller amounts of space currently and we can most certainly set a limit on the size limit for the re-generated srpms cache. 3)re-generation of srpms on the fly lets us provide more than the absolute minimum in required service. We should be aiming to provide source distribution for everything we've built through koji and has been in a publicly facing repository.. including rawhide. The big ball of hardlinked srpms certainly can't give us source distribution coverage that also includes everything seen in the public rawhide tree. -jef _______________________________________________ fedora-advisory-board mailing list fedora-advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board
