Re: What has happened.
"J.A. Bezemer" <costar@panic.et.tudelft.nl> writes:
> Therefore, it might be wise to make one (and only one) beta (="pre-final")
> set of images/CDs.
This almost certainly won't work, I'm afraid, since the one image we
produce is bound to be fatally flawed in some way, so we'll instantly
have to make another one. Anything that delays the production of that
fixed image is a bad idea IMHO.
Anyway, with rsync it's no great hardship to download a new image, and
if the images change during the download you just need to check the
md5sum at the end, and keep rsyncing until the md5sums match.
> Make it available on only one (fast) FTP site and announce
> it properly, and possibly burn some CDs and mail them to testers.
FTP/HTTP is pretty much useless for CD image downloads and certainly
shouldn't be encouraged, since you have to actually download the whole
image. There are no sites fast enough to allow this to work
effectively. The last time we released images, sunsite.org.uk (our
best mirror) ended up producing so much traffic on the London JANET
backbone that the JANET admins pulled Imperial College's connection
(where sunsite lives) for two days. They have a 622Mbit ATM link
IIRC, so could be considered to be a fast site.
To get an idea of what we're talking about here, to download a single
CD image (650MB) over an ISDN line (7KB/s on a good day) takes over 24
hours. When cdimage.debian.org was first in use, there were no
restrictions on access and it had 10Mbit/s to the Internet. It got to
the point where it was busy enough that the average download time was
about one week per CD image, which really means that almost nobody got
hold of the images at all.
An rsync download over the same ISDN line can take as little as half
an hour, if only minor changes have occurred (as is generally the case
between adjacent beta versions of a CD)
Cheers, Phil.
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