On Thu, 2009-04-09 at 10:21 -0400, Lamar Owen wrote:
On Wednesday 08 April 2009 17:36:18 R P Herrold wrote:
I would be thrilled to have a simultaneous coordinated release, but the 'leak' of 'patched' torrent instances, and at least two mirrors opening the full ISO set before the coordinated bit flip date and time, leave rather a bad outlook to me as to the ability to make things better through such an 'inverted as to demand' approach
My $0.02 .... I'd love to be shown a path to avoid the problems on the 5.3 roll-out
Russ, Karnbir, et al:
[...]
Now, as to the technical issues, it seems to me that a fully ACID compliant transactional repository mirror system is possibly one way to eliminate most of these issues. Such a system to my knowledge does not yet exist;
If you want to have a technical talk, you probably want to speak to Matt Domsch who does the mirroring for Fedora (releases 2x a year and rawhide :).
As of "recent" versions of yum, creating repos. with --unique-md-filenames means an atomic move from a fully working old DB to a new one can¹ be done with rename("new-repomd.xml", "repomd.xml"). Which, excepting ext4 ;), is pretty atomic. However my understanding, from speaking to Matt, is that "release day" problems are almost entirely due to getting that very last change to all the mirrors in a timely manner.
Also metalink data can be used to automatically filter out mirrors with old repomd.xml.
However those both require some sacrifices for people using the GA version of yum in CentOS-5, so I'm doubtful that's it's worth the pain.
[...]
But the current pull updating structure doesn't lend itself readily to this.
Trying not to speak too much for Matt, but my understanding is that almost no external mirrors will accept pull mirroring.
¹ My understanding is that no mirrors both with this level of atomic update, but it's possible.