I have now arranged for a mirror to be set up at CUI - my old lab at the
university of Geneva - I hope it will come up in time for alpha-2.
CUI is glad to help, but that is not a permanent solution - CUI normally
does not provide this kind of service - permanent mirroring services
should be provided by Switch as soon as a stable Mageia release becomes
available. I will pursue the discussion with Switch.
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).
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.
I think that, when the stable release approaches, a small campaign to
rectify these prejudices would be an excellent thing.
Talking with the people at Switch who maintain the Switch mirroring
service, there were also some concrete and technical arguments - I
quote, translating from German:
"the communication with the mirror sites at Mandriva had already been
minimal, compared with other distros: announcing releases, checking the
availability at the mirrors (QA), etc" (which is a mere quote, dont ask
me to interpret).
Switch is reluctant to maintain a mirror at "assembly language level"
("just run rsync every 2 hours"), they would prefer solutions using
something like MirrorBrain - but probably Mandriva experiences are part
of the background to this argument.
At present, putting a mirror on a univeristy site puts it into an
environment which is in good match to the straightforward rsync approach
- correct for the alpha period of Mageia.
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.
