Uwe Kiewel wrote:
Tru Huynh schrieb:
On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 02:59:22PM -0400, Nick Olsen wrote:
Addition of jigdo yes. Replace ISO's no. Educating joe sixpack on using something new, well I like to use altercation avoidance.
please no top posting ;)
There was a thread about jidgo in the archives and it boiled down to:
- someone has to maintain the jidgo package in the CentOS tree
(how would a CentOS user for C3/4/5 use jidgo?)
- document it in the wiki (how to use, at least)
- someone needs to make it work from the current setup
- how much burden will it put on the mirrors? centos.org ones and public ones?
(I have no experience on using it)
- no one volonteered.
- one more thing to check for the QA release process.
back to you :)
Ok. Understood.
It was just an idea because Fedora do it successfuly since Fedora 6 and Debian do so as well.
Ok back that monkey truck up slightly here. Fedora has *ONLY* been doing it for the Fedora Spins stuff which, as you can imagine, an *INCREDIBLY* low volume set of accesses. Debian is going to be likewise, and I wouldn't exactly call it a popular thing from them.
Speaking as a mirror here are my thoughts:
- Cutting down on the working data set is a good thing, though I do have some serious reservations about this on a larger scale.
- Claiming a webserver doesn't handle large files is a bogus statement, if your on Linux you have send_file() and that is darned fast and efficient. It more or less doesn't matter what your file size is for that.
- If your on a client, or a server, and it doesn't support http restarts you really have to ask why? I can understand how *PAINFUL* that is to a mirror to do a random seek into the middle of a file, but once the download has started it's effectively no additional overhead beyond that.
- Speaking to the apache module that auto-generates the iso on the fly: any mirror of any reasonable size will shoot this down in a heartbeat. We already have an I/O problem on the systems, ram issues, etc. Adding something into apache that's going to thrash about and magically generate this as it's requested is *WORSE* than the wasted disk space. Again send_file() is your friend.
My thoughts ------------
Honestly if Centos is actively looking to eliminate the ISOs I would tentatively support this, but Jigdo (at least the last time I used it) is *ANYTHING* but userfriendly. It would *HAVE* to be as simple as download a script, program, etc you get a download box and *poof* your dvd comes out, no user interaction unless a lot of advanced options are selected somewhere, and last time I used it it wasn't that simple.
Furthermore I think jigdo is likely going to be a lot of work, with little payoff. From my gut reaction I think moving to more of a universal network installer (ala http://boot.kernel.org w/ it's network installers, which happen to include Centos)[Disclaimer: I'm one of the devs & the primary admin for http://boot.kernel.org] is a *LOT* more intuitive to a user and a lot simpler to get them to use than Jigdo ever will be, and honestly it gets a user moving sooner and it can take less time anyway depending on what a user selects, has all of the advantages of Jigdo and with significantly fewer downsides.
Just my $0.02
- John 'Warthog9' Hawley Chief Kernel.org Administrator