A modest proposal from Debian's Release Team [LWN.net]

A modest proposal from Debian's Release Team

Posted Mar 17, 2005 3:21 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)
Parent article: A modest proposal from Debian's Release Team

the biggest problem with this (as I pointed out in the earlier story) is the requirement that a port must be 10% of download from the mirrors

as someone else pointed out this would eliminate all ports except i386 according to the current measurements, I think they said the PPC was the next highest at 3%

allowing some ports to release later is not a bad idea, but saying that the secondary ports won't ever 'release', but instead just provide 'snapshots' (which won't have security team support) invalidates one of the big reasons to have a release (anyone can setup their own mirror and snapshot that to use themselves, simply providing a snapshot doesn't help anyone much)

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A modest proposal from Debian's Release Team

Posted Mar 17, 2005 10:12 UTC (Thu) by grouch (guest, #27289) [Link]

> the biggest problem with this (as I pointed out in the earlier story) is the requirement that a port must be 10% of download from the mirrors

Agreed. If such a requirement applied to operating systems in general, GNU/Linux itself would never have been downloadable. Something just doesn't feel right about an arbitrary 10% cut-off, but I'm not a Debian developer so I can't really squawk too much.

A modest proposal from Debian's Release Team

Posted Mar 17, 2005 10:18 UTC (Thu) by nijhof (subscriber, #4034) [Link]

the biggest problem with this (as I pointed out in the earlier story) is the requirement that a port must be 10% of download from the mirrors

There was a bit of confusion for that, but that is not a requirement for the architecture to be released -- only for the architecture to be carried by ftp.debian.org. Architectures that have fewer downloads, would be carried by ssc.debian.org, or ports.debian.org or whatever -- and would be released from there, if they meet the release criteria.

So this 10% requirement is decoupled from the release criteria.

A modest proposal from Debian's Release Team

Posted Mar 18, 2005 7:31 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

so this means that the debian mirror system with be i386 only as nothing else qualifies?

the mirror system is more then just a way to save bandwidth on the master server, it also lets people avoid congested international lines and survive server outages

why should those advantages be thrown away?

I'll bet that there are packages in the i386 port that are used significantly less frequently then some packages in the 'minor' ports, if you're going to save space on the mirror servers look on a per-package basis instead of per port (yes it will mean some work to figure out the refrences for those people who do actually want those packages, but it's not _that_ hard)