-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA224 >>> 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 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) iFYEARELAAYFAlSRjoYACgkQLaxZSoRZrGEjowDgoTHN8a5dsvSo8HHkWwb0CEVn yNIJ9XvsYt4/JQDfcqtMrVNARXACUECgBxjzJrDo1tdyI0n/I4il0Q== =Va0J -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----