[CentOS] yum vs up2date

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2006-09-07 at 12:10 -0400, Jim Perrin wrote:
> > What on Earth does that have to do with anything?  You've got poor
> > connectivity or expensive connectivity or both in the "last mile" part
> > of your link to the Internet.  How is changing the mirroring system
> > going to help you or others like you?
> 
> Faulty question. Changing the mirror system would help him. This is
> why he wants it done. The question more appropriately (in my mind at
> least) is "Should centos get into the business of tweaking the mirror
> so that it suits the special case last mile users?"

You should at least try to understand how it goes wrong and make
sure that isn't true for the general case.

> The current mirror system is a vast improvement over the previous design.

I have to disagree.  Many machines here run through the same caching
proxy and the current system rarely has a cache hit, while the
earlier version almost always had hits after the first machine had
done an update.  Or maybe I'm comparing the centos3 scheme to centos4.
I don't really know what has changed, but centos4 is as bad as fedora at
defeating what caching proxies are intended to do.  Whatever you are
doing to choose an appropriate mirror is not at all consistent from a
given location so every subsequent request ends up pulling from a
different url.  If what you are doing is correct, shouldn't it be
repeatable from the same location (i.e. through the same proxy)?

> There's some parental pride which will be resistant to change over the
> current script, although if it's a worthwhile improvement, I'm sure
> reason will prevail.

Maybe those claimed 1.5 million users are really a few users or
locations
with a lot of machines...  Letting proxies work as designed would
make sense to me.

> I believe that we provide a general service, and that to some extent,
> it's up to individual users to tweak to suit their unique needs.

Users that are behind a common proxy generally know that, or the
proxy may intercept transparently.  There's no particular reason to
think that this set of users know anything else about each other,
or what OS distribution the others might be using.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com