-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Ah, what a wonderful scholastic assignment. It's also great that Mike is going to have to open the letter once it actually makes to him. Dear Mr. McGrath, As long time Fedora developers, we both have watched and lived through the growing pains of Fedora releases. With the onset of the merging between core and extras, we have successfully created the needed infrastructure on which even basic Linux users can create their own Fedora-based derivative distribution. Along with this achievement comes the task of providing hosting infrastructure for an average user/developer to be able to share his/her creation with the world. An additional benefit in being directly involved in the sharing of the "Spins" is the ability to data mine what packages people are including in custom spins as to give our developer base more focus. To be able to fulfill this task, please consider requesting additional resources to archive signed updates so that they can be publicly accessed for the duration of a release life-cycle. The long road of Fedora development has been bumpy and even not enjoyable at times. Throughout the duration of the Fedora 7 release, we have made some very amazing changes that helped to open Fedora up to the masses. One of the most community-based features is the ability to Re-Mix and Re-Spin the distribution as the end-user sees fit. Being the server team lead for Fedora Unity, I've had to come up with unique ways to share the Re-Spins we compose. After trying many approaches with different technologies, we have settled on using Jigdo, the jigsaw downloader. Debian has used Jigdo for some time now and after poking their system for a while I've seen they keep every update they push. I do understand that Debian is considered a stable distribution much in the way RHEL is considered stable. This makes the updates tree not as active and it is easier to find mirrors to carry the full data set for an extended period of time. We, however, need to find a way to offer this same extended life for signed packages that have hit the Fedora updates tree. The amount of storage and bandwidth able to be saved can be illustrated by a simple comparison between the efficiency of chopping up a 3.4GB iso9660 file system arbitrarily (by a static chunk size) and the same file system based on contents (file by file.) For a BitTorrent, Fedora's current choice for sharing Spins, the hosted data is only valid for a given chunk on a single ISO. This data's footprint (equal to the combined chunk sizes of the entire torrent) can be used for nothing but this Spin. To be able to host 5 Spins composed from similar trees via BitTorrent, we now have a footprint of 17GB, not to mention "seeders" have to run BitTorrent software to be able to contribute to the swarm. Alternatively, Jigdo can be used to reduce the footprint of these 5 Spins to about 4GB. The amount of additional data needing to be hosted for each Spin, in addition to what data is already pushed to the mirrors, is about 150MB per ISO with anaconda and about 200KB for ISOs without the installer bits. To help illustrate the efficiency of using Jigdo vs BitTorrent, the footprint for 250 Spins is 850GB for BitTorrent and about 40GB for Jigdo. Additionally, a reduction in overhead can be achieved by removing the need for the BitTorrent tracker and all related network traffic without requiring any additional work on the part of mirror administrators. The current updates system is getting better each release, but I think we should adjust our policies to also have an “updates-archive” repository. This repository will include all signed updates that had once lived in the updates repo, for the duration of the releases life-cycle. I don't expect all mirrors would want to carry this extra data so making the new repo optional will be a must. With the new MirrorManager, we will be able to effectively point users at mirrors that have been willing to take on the extra footprint. These requests to MirrorManager could be used to compose reports on what packages the community is utilizing most, allowing us to better focus our efforts. By providing an unified point of entry for data, we will be able to also log requests for package data found on in-house and non-official spins. By utilizing the abilities of MirrorManager to return specific mirrors for pre-defined IP blocks, we will enable end-users and companies to download from on-site mirrors while maintaining complete transparency. I hope that with advancements in Jigdo client software we will be able to look at using Jigdo to host our official images. Please let me know your thoughts on this matter. As always, thanks, - -- Jonathan Steffan daMaestro GPG Fingerprint: 93A2 3E2F DC26 5570 3472 5B16 AD12 6CE7 0D86 AF59 - -- Jonathan Steffan daMaestro GPG Fingerprint: 93A2 3E2F DC26 5570 3472 5B16 AD12 6CE7 0D86 AF59 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFHWGltrRJs5w2Gr1kRAinaAKCSRaTWjuCtsGQKWsvuhCXKm0qSdQCfbj/N 52VVTOYXSQn4qLlfXThEpMg= =ciP1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Fedora-infrastructure-list mailing list Fedora-infrastructure-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-infrastructure-list
