[Mageia-discuss] Mirror

[Wolfgang Bornath]

2011/3/9 Juergen Harms <Juergen.Harms at unige.ch>:

> Talking to people at Switch brought up some facts which Mandriva should be
> aware of:
>  - There is a heritage of bad experience that has been made with Mandriva.
>  - It is not the first time that I hear the argument Mageia = Mandriva =
> forgetit.
>  - Mageia happens at present to be perceived as "just another one of those
> distros that appear and disappear to oblivion" (maybe with a component of
> unfriendlyness towards Linux).

Yes, I guess this is based on personal opinions and you can't really fight that.

> By the way, at my university there was a similar experience: Mandriva was
> part of the officially supported infrastructure (mirror, consultancy), with
> fees paid to Mandriva - that broke in dysharmony due to bad administrative
> response from Mandriva, leaving quite some ill feeling. Sorry if I wade
> through these negative arguments, but these beyond-the-enthusiast-user
> spotlights count.

You can't compare this setup with anything related to Mageia. Mageia
does not ask to become a consultant to Switch and Mageia does not ask
for any fees. Furthermore "bad administrative response" is one of
those things about Mandriva that Mageia will avoid by all means. It
was caused by lack of manpower of a commercial company, something
which is totally different at Mageia.

> I think that, when the stable release approaches, a small campaign to
> rectify these prejudices would be an excellent thing.

Time to rectify those prejudices is now, at any time at any place (not
only with mirror providers but in general).

> But I think that on the long-run there are lessons to be learned from the
> discussion with Switch - mirrors for a stable Mageia should be preferably
> hosted at professionally run mirror sites (who make the kind of
> consideration I quoted above), university solutions should come as
> additional icing. In case of a second round of discussion on how to organise
> Mageia mirrors, it might be a good idea to have that discussion with some
> participation from the mirror sites.

I can not confirm nor agree to this. As Oliver wrote, 2 universities
already set up a mirror for Mageia and when looking around worldwide
who is hosting a Mandriva mirror you will notice that educational
institutions (aka universities) are the majority.

Using MirrorBrain may or may not be an improvement (I can't judge
this) but IMHO it should not be a criterium to mirror or not.

Of course, if Switch wants it that way then it is up to the Mageia
sysadmins to decide what is the better way - implementing MirrorBrain
to please Switch or not implement it and forget about Switch - not
speaking about other advantages/disadvantages which may come with
Mirrorbrain.

-- 
wobo