[Mageia-dev] Mirror layout

Sun Dec 12 18:57:52 CET 2010

On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 12:36:05AM -0500, andre999 wrote:
+> Michael scherer a écrit :
+> >
+> >On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 08:16:33AM -0500, andre999 wrote:
+> >
+> >>>Not to mention that a ratio of 2 mirrors in the USA out of a total
+> >>>of 25 seems rather odd, for something that admins do not care.
+> >>
+> >>2 of 25 PLF mirrors in the U.S.
+> >
+> >Technically, 1, since the other is down ( and should be removed from
+> >the list ).
+> >So a ratio of 4%.
+> 
+> Unless you are going to analyse what is down for the other distros,
+> you should say 2 ± 1, that is 4 to 12%
+
+Ok, when I say down, I should say "the domain no longer exist". It is just
+not registered. Not "down and it will be up" later, but "down someone didn't
+bother to pay the domain". Obviously, I should not assume that people 
+check facts before telling me my numbers are wrong.
+
+And since other distributions have various systems to detect this ( mandriva have one, 
+fedora have one, opensuse too ), there is no need to touch to the number.
+PLF do not have any checking tasks, so the mirror was not seen as wrong.
+
+There is 1 working mirror and the svn changelog show that this number is quite
+stable enough.
+
+And I would have removed the incorrect one, if I didn't consider this as 
+a abuse of my root privilege on zarb.org.
+
+> Or 9%.  Depending on how you want to fudge the figures.
+
+There is no estimate or fudging involved, we have exact number 
+of mirrors, I gave the url for each distributions.
+
+
+> But maybe it is because they (in policy at least) exclude non-free
+> software ?
+
+So does debian. 
+
+> And just how rigorously do they apply a no patent-constrained
+> software policy ?
+
+A quick research could have answered to this question :
+http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Software_Patents
+
+They used to remove mp3 support from source code :
+http://www.csparks.com/redhatUnhoarked/index.xhtml
+
+But that was 5 years ago. Nowadays, I do not think they still do it
+as icecast for example is not modified ( despites supporting mp3 format
+but maybe because there is no trace of codecs, it is ok ).
+
+> Haven't I heard somewhere that Fedora (and RedHat) are based in the
+> U.S. ?  So wouldn't it be natural to expect that it would have a
+> higher proportion of sites there ?
+
+Debian too is based in the US ( managed since 1996 by SPI, based in NYC ). 
+So does Novell ( created in Utah, headquarters in Massachusetts ). 
+ 
+> >And I didn't count other country such as Japan, where patents on software
+> >are permitted ( http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Japan ), and where the count of PLF
+> >mirrors vs Fedora mirrors is 0 to 8.
+> 
+> 0 ± 1 gives 0 to 12%.  Same ballpark.
+> Also, recruiting Fedora mirrors could be driven by the commercial
+> interests of RedHat.
+
+"could" is a supposition, and I think you should give facts, not suppositions.
+
+For the mirror, there is 2 private R&D labs ( KDDI, RIKEN ), 2 university 
+( Yamagata, JAIST ), and the rest are network related ( iij.ad.jp, wide.ad.jp, 
+dti.ad.jp, ftp.ne.jp see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.jp for the meaning of 
+the various second level domain ). 
+
+So I doubt that commercial interest of the main sponsor have something to do, 
+since the profile is quite similar to the usual one of most mirrors ( ie, 
+people with lots of bandwidth, servers, and interest into helping free software ).
+
+
+> >More ever, the fact that this is hosted by some private and rather anonymous
+> >company is also a important point. Ie, no .edu or big telco ever contacted
+> >PLF to host a mirror, while in France and another country, PLF have both.
+> 
+> Considering that PLF is based on Mandriva, and Mandriva is based in
+> France, wouldn't it be natural to expect PLF to be better
+> represented there ?
+
+I think you missed the point. Let me explain :
+
+There is no USA university, nor USA telecom company that contacted PLF.
+
+On the other hand, in other part of the world, PLF is mainly hosted by telecom 
+company ( like Zoomnet and Bentel, for example ) and by universities ( Porto, Taiwan, 
+Bahcesehir among others ). 
+
+> >>Also, there are only about 400 packages for i586 in PLF mirrors.
+> >>Since most are duplicated, I wonder how many distinct packages there are ?
+> >>Somehow doubt that an unlicenced copy of quotes from the Simpsons
+> >>(one of the 2 plf packages that I didn't find also in Mandriva main)
+> >>is going to be a big attraction.
+> >
+> >You should look a little bit more closely. For example, libdvdcss2 is plf only.
+> >So does various emulator, lame ( and related like darkice ), gstreamer-bad,
+> >etc. There is amule, and similar software. More than 2.
+> 
+> Of the twenty or so PLF packages that I found looking through
+> available packages with Mandriva and PLF repositories enabled, only
+> 2 did not also have the same version in Mandriva.  (All Mandriva
+> main, in this sample.)  That is about 10% not in Mandriva.
+> So for arguments sake let's say 20% are not in Mandriva.  That makes
+> only about 80 packages only in PLF.
+> Impressive, isn't it ?
+
+You said on https://mageia.org/pipermail/mageia-dev/20101201/001576.html
+that you have decades of programming experience. So I assume that writing
+a script to get more precise numbers would not be too hard instead of 
+saying "I counted somewhere 20 packages in a limited part of the 
+distribution" :/
+
+> BTW, gstreamer*plugins-bad is in Mandriva contrib.
+
+But not all subpackages. Take a look at the spec file ( using 
+mdvsys should ease the work ) and see that 5 subpackages 
+are conditionnaly built.
+
+I think you may have missed the point about PLF rpms being at Mandriva.
+( or the contrary, depend on how you look ).
+
+They share the same source code, but they do not link to the same 
+software, or use the same configure options. 
+
+So Mandriva considered that distributing mplayer without enabling mp3
+write support ( with lame ) was safe enough. PLF do the distribution
+of lame, and rebuild mplayer with it ( so mencoder can write mp3 ). 
+Fedora do not distribute mplayer at all.
+
+And that's basically the same scheme for various dual life packages 
+( with variations about the feature that is enabled, there used to be a issue
+on font hinting, for freetype and bytecode interpreter )
+
+-- 
+Michael Scherer
+