[Mageia-dev] Mirror layout

Mon Dec 13 07:27:46 CET 2010

Michael scherer a écrit :
+>
+> 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.
+
+Right, we should have both said "discontinued".  Did you understand my 
+point about verifying others distro's mirrors ?
+
+My point about comparing the numbers still stands.  Unless you've seen 
+anyone with 2,5 mirrors, for example.  And my comparisons of numbers 
+don't take into account other factors, which would obviously have at 
+least some effect.
+
+What I'm saying, essentially, is that your numbers in no way support 
+your hypothesis that carrying patented software significantly reduces 
+the availability of mirrors.  In some cases, your numbers even suggest 
+the contrary.  (If you don't consider other factors.)
+
+> 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.
+>
+> ...
+>
+> And I would have removed the incorrect one, if I didn't consider this as
+> a abuse of my root privilege on zarb.org.
+
+BTW, you could have added a comment to the page.  I'm sure it would have 
+been appreciated.
+
+>> 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.
+
+It's your methods of comparison that I'm questioning, not the raw 
+figures.  Have you ever seen statistics that say something like "on the 
+average, each family has 2,2 children" ?
+And have you ever seen a real 0,2 child ?
+Or realize that some families will have 1 or 4 or more children, and not 
+just 2 or 3 ?
+Hopefully you understand this point.
+
+>> But maybe it is because they (in policy at least) exclude non-free
+>> software ?
+>
+> So does debian.
+
+Current Debian documentation says that they have repositories called 
+"main", "contrib", and "non-free".  (Verified on a current Debian mirror.)
+Just what do they put in "non-free" ?
+Their documentation says software without a recognized open source 
+licence or subject to patent claims.
+
+>> 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 ).
+
+So apparently not that rigorously, after all.
+
+>> 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 ).
+
+Interesting.  A distro which accepts patent-constrained software (in 
+their "non-free" repositories) is now based in the USA.
+And you said that 13% of their mirrors were in the USA ?
+
+> ...
+>
+>>> 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.
+
+Just as your side of the argument is a supposition.  Which is exactly my 
+point.  Your "facts" don't give convincing support of your supposition.
+As far as this supposition goes, if Fedora and/or RedHat (a well-known 
+entity in free software) were to approach potential mirrors in Japan, 
+but PLF (almost unknown) did not, just who do you think is more likely 
+to attract mirror hosts ?
+
+BTW, you might also have mentioned that there are only 2 Mandriva 
+mirrors in Japan.  (The first 2 you mention below.)
+
+> 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 ).
+
+See my explanation above.
+
+>>> 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.
+
+And how many USA universities or telecom companies did the PLF contact ?
+
+> 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 ).
+
+In Canada, I don't know of any mirror sites hosted by telecom companies. 
+  And mirror sites at universities are maintained by student 
+associations. (Generally the computer science club.)
+A Mandriva mirror at a university in my region of Canada discontinued, 
+apparently because the students involved in the (engineering) student 
+club sponsoring it either lost interest, or more likely, graduated. 
+Before being discontinued, we had many problems accessing it, starting 
+about the end of the academic year.  (There was a lot of discussion 
+locally on the net about the problems, so I wasn't the only one affected.)
+
+Mandriva continued to list it as a mirror for quite a long time afterwards.
+(For updates I have always been automatically directed to a slighty 
+closer USA mirror site.)
+
+I would imagine that mirror sites in the USA are more or less as in 
+Canada - none hosted by telecom companies, university-hosted at the 
+whims of interested students.
+
+>>>> 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" :/
+
+I did a quick check for codec and mpeg packages, presumably many being 
+patent-affected.  It took me all of 2 minutes.  Just to get a sample.  A 
+complete count serves no purpose.
+
+>> 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.
+
+ok
+
+> 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.
+
+Makes sense.  Writing mp3 has more at risk of being contested.
+And creating content with proprietory protocols really isn't the 
+vocation of a distro promoting free software.
+
+> 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 )
+
+Not surprised.  So the PLF is useful, at least for some.
+
+BTW, I'm not trying to doubt the value of your experience and 
+contributions, or even to say that we couldn't work well together in my 
+intended future contributions.  Just that I disagree with your 
+assessment of the impact of patent-affected software in attracting 
+sufficient mirrors.
+That doesn't mean that it might not be, sometime in the future, useful 
+to have a separate set of repositories for software affected by various 
+legal or other constraints.  Although, in that event, I would very much 
+prefer that it happens in a separate group, for which I think that the 
+PLF would be ideal.
+Particularly since they could do the job for both Mageia and Mandriva, 
+as well as Unity, and any other distro that cares to join (the open 
+invitation by PLF) in the future.
+(Athough I do think that they could improve their image by replacing the 
+guns in their logo with something else :/)
+And mirror sites open to carrying such software could use a single set 
+of repos for all the distros concerned.
+
+Another 2 cents :)
+
+- André
+