trinity-devel@lists.pearsoncomputing.net

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Month: April 2019

Re: [trinity-devel] TDE Mirrors

From: Slávek Banko <slavek.banko@...>
Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2019 20:32:27 +0200
Hi Mike,

thank you for your comments. They point to an unsatisfactory situation 
that has existed for a long time, is quietly overlooked, but which needs 
to be addressed. See comments below.

On Wednesday 17 of April 2019 18:46:23 Mike Bird wrote:
> So 14.0.6 was released a few weeks ago and I didn't notice.  That's
> odd. Particularly odd, in fact, as I run the primary TDE mirror. 
> Normally TDE releases are coordinated with the primary TDE mirror in
> order so ensure a smooth deployment.
>

Since the beginning of December, we have been looking at the primary site 
because we wanted to start the process of releasing a new release. But at 
the beginning of December Tim started a kind of migrations. There was no 
information from Tim before, during, or after the migration. It was not 
clear when the primary site would be fully operational again.

At the beginning of March the situation looked good, so we started to 
build the final packages for R14.0.6. Upon completion of the builds, I 
published the packages to the official repository and expected to start 
mirroring to your primary mirror. But then I found that since mid of 
December the mirroring is not working at all.

I remember you pointed out this problem in December. But we can't do 
anything about it - only Tim can. We sent information to Tim, reminded 
several times, but still without success.


> The last post to trinity-announce was in August 2018.  If there was an
> announcement of 14.0.6 on -user or -devel I missed it.  The web site
> https://www.trinitydesktop.org/releases.php doesn't list 14.0.6 as a
> release although there is a mention of 14.0.6 on the home page.
>
> Looking back at the various list archives for March and April I only
> see a discussion of an Ubuntu LiveCD being updated to 14.0.6 but I had
> ignored that because we don't run Ubuntu.
>

Because the packages were published to the official repository and the 
update could begin to spread to users, we had to send a announce about 
release R14.0.6.

We can post a message that appears on the TDE home page and is also 
published in RSS. I also sent the announce to the trinity-announce 
mailing list. But trinity-announce is moderated and only Tim can approve 
the post. I've been asking Tim for permission for trinity-announce for me 
since August, but to this point without success.

I have prepared an update for the website to show the current version 
R14.0.6. Here is enough to pull commit and apply to the official site. 
But the only one who can do so is Tim. We sent information to Tim, 
reminded several times, but still without success.

The same is for source tarballs. Only Tim can make changes to these parts 
of the archive, which is the basis for the mirror system.


> However the redirector http://mirror.ppa.trinitydesktop.org/ seems to
> have been hijacked to bypass the mirrors in favor of whichever mystery
> repository has 14.0.6.  This of course doesn't help people who have
> selected a specific mirror for improved performance and consistency.
>

Redirector makes no mysteries. You can see that R14.0.6 is in the official 
repository on the primary server (obviously if it is not a day out). 
Redirector is designed to be very helpful in releasing new releases. 
Therefore, the redirector serves R14.0.6 packages to users.

If the redirector didn't work in the way he works now, there would be a 
lot more confusion. You might remember the situation that was usual 
earlier - users received error 404 when accessing packages or caused an 
overload of the primary site. I must say that I am glad that this 
situation is a thing of the past thanks to the redirector.


> A bunch of people are paying for and maintaining mirrors that don't
> have 14.0.6.  When were you going to tell us that we are wasting our
> time and money?
>

As I wrote at the beginning, current situation is not good.

Here's a series of things we can't do, because Tim is the only one who 
can. I fully respect that Tim is very busy. But it is very annoyning when 
for minor tasks such as approval of announce, applying commit to web, we 
must remind Tim again, again, over and over. Until now, we have not 
succeeded in a few small tasks that we asked from Tim since August.

I understand that you are angry and you feel that we are wasting your 
efforts. You should know, that we very much appreciate your efforts. We 
also want things to happen better. We encounter the above problems more 
often, not just when the new version is released. And often we also feel 
lost efforts. Even so, we still try to do the best we can. But there are 
things that are simply not possible in the current situation. Something 
has to change.


> --Mike
>

Cheers
-- 
Sl�vek

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