I think the rsync'ed cookers out there like to ride the bleeding edge where
those of us who wait for the beta isos are looking for more of a "Ok, we've
fixed the last round of bugs, now report only bugs that happen in this
version."
We hit the servers up for the isos, burn CD's and go through the whole
install just like someone who had just purchased the gold. I like
mandrake's whole beta system here. They don't behave like they're rushed to
push 7.1 out the door before it's ready. I think they're waiting for one of
the isos to come back with 0 or near 0 bugs reported before they call it
7.1 final. Great system, M$ could take a lesson from it.
-David Talbot
At 11:04 AM 5/23/00 -0600, you wrote:
>Hi,
>
>perhaps a dumb comment regarding the following (IMHO very good) idea:
>
>> > > > 2. How did your CTO respond to the need for a constant single name
>> > > > for the most current beta iso image? This requirement is dictated to
>> > >
>> > > i'm not sure i understand what is your request..
>> >
>> > Repeated (it IS important!):
>> >
>> > This requirement is dictated to permit incremental download of
>> > [iso image file] changes by rsync. Without this
>> > constraint on your operations, beta-testers will be faced with a
>> > complete near 1 GB download every time the beta iso is changed, which
>> > is totally unnecessary and an enormous load on your server and its
>> > mirrors - rsync downloads only the changes within the server file and
>> > edits them into the local client file.
>> >
>
>> Okay, I understand now. This is a very good idea to save bandwidth. The
>> only problem that could stay, is that people will have less visibility on
>> the different versions of the ISO.
>
>won't it work to have in the /iso directory something like
>hydrogen-beta-current.iso which is in fact just a symlink to the real file,
>and which gets updated as new beta versions are introduced to point to the
>most up to date one? This would provide a constant name for remote rsync
>users, while still allowing the Mandrake folks to keep an archive of each
>beta version explicitly available. And it wouldn't cost any more in space,
>since it's just a link. This sounds painfully obvious so maybe there's a good
>reason why it doesn't work and I just don't see it (I don't have much
>experience with rsync).
>
>Just an idea.
>
>Best,
>
>Fernando
