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>>> Give it a couple weeks to mirror.  Right now we are having some issues
>>> with our primary mirror (see the threads by Mike Bird on this list),
>>> and
>>> the financial state of the project cannot support a high bandwidth to
>>> upload them faster.
>>
>> Weeks?!?
>
> Donations have dropped off sharply over the past two years (probably due
> to the lack of new releases); believe it or not I pull in less than 15% of
> my total *operating* costs (this does not include the cost of the
> equipment itself).  This is a large donation on my part to the project, in
> addition to the heavy development I have done on TDE over the past 6
> years, and I cannot continue to bleed cash on the required scale just to
> have a faster upload of packages I don't even use.  From what I gather
> this is the sad state of affairs in many open source projects these days;
> this is all probably related to global economic issues but I cannot be
> sure.
>
> I am hoping R14 will revitalize the project financially and I can then
> revisit these decisions, but for now I am constrained by factors outside
> of my control.  TDE will continue to exist (a GIT server is quite cheap),
> but the future form of this project will be determined by our users in the
> coming months.
>
>>> Sorry about the delay; I wish I could improve the speed but external
>>> factors impose constraints as always. :-)
>>
>> I would have thought minimal QA was to ensure all mirrors were ready
>> before pushing the official announcement. Carts and horses and all that.
>
> They were, but the RPM builds were not ready.  I made an administrative
> decision to release R14 at this time as the source was ready and the
> Debian/Ubuntu builds were ready.  I considered that it would do more
> damage to both halt development for that length of time and spread out the
> "release" (thus causing loss of visibility) than it would to simply delay
> the RPM build availability.
>
> While TDE has grown significantly from its early days we are still very
> small compared to large corporate-sponsored projects like KDE, Gnome,
> systemd, etc.  This means our development process will, by nature, be
> slower and bumpier than that of the larger projects.
>
> Tim

On re-reading this message my tone may have not reflected what I was
actually thinking.

The RPM (and Slackware, and <insert distro here> packages are a very
important part of TDE.  I want to thank Francois for providing the RPM
builds; much of my ire above is directed at the technical design of the
various packaging systems which require a centralized repository to
function.  For small projects this is not much of an issue; for something
the size of TDE we are suddenly looking at a 200GB archive and very high
bandwidth costs even with a fairly sophisticated mirroring system in
place.

TDE will continue to support various distributions for as long as their
respective builders/maintainers are willing to provide packages; the
initial transfer speeds to the mirror system will be degraded depending on
the project's financial status but this is a relative nit imposed by the
unfortunate constraints of the real world.

Tim
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