X.Org Board Meetings: Mar. 2 Summary, Mar. 16 Agenda

[Eberhard Moenkeberg]

Hi,

On Wed, 10 Mar 2010, Alan Coopersmith wrote:

> A summary and IRC log of the March 2 meeting of the X.Org Board of Directors
> are now posted at:
>
> http://www.x.org/wiki/BoardOfDirectors/MeetingSummaries/2010/03-02

Excerpt:

   X.Org Mirrors:

   Bart raised a concern about the X.Org official mirrors list, as he
   occasionally receives mail from people asking permission to mirror.
   While the Board agreed no permission is needed to mirror binaries, and
   the MIT license gives the freedom to mirror at will, X.Org has
   maintained a list of recognized mirror sites on our web pages, and we
   have exercised control over adding new sites to that list. Discussion
   was held over what level of control X.Org should maintain - from whether
   we should be responsible for checking that mirrors are still active, up
   to date and with uncorrupted binaries, to just providing a
   world-editable wiki page with a "use at your own risk" disclaimer, or
   somewhere in between. No decision was reached, and members were asked to
   think on the issue for future discussion.

I am voting for "freedom" here, but also for a tiered hierarchy: tier-1 
mirrors should stay watched like now and "officially" published, but a 
tier-2 line of additional "untrusted" mirrors should get allowed and also 
officially offered, but with a notice "we just don't know about the 
state".

With other software projects, we have lots of "unmentioned" mirrors which 
do a good secondary job.

We could advise "please choose your nearest secondary mirror, and if you 
are in doubt about the integrity, try after that to rsync your repository 
again against rsync://ftp.x.org/ftp/ or any tier-1 mirror".

This way traffic could get delegated to new helpers - in case we will need 
that once.


Viele Gruesse
Eberhard Moenkeberg (emoenke at gwdg.de, em at kki.org)

-- 
Eberhard Moenkeberg
Arbeitsgruppe IT-Infrastruktur
E-Mail: emoenke at gwdg.de      Tel.: +49 (0)551 201-1551
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