[Clipart] Canceling Dec Clipart Release

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Bryce Harrington <bryce at bryceharrington.com> writes:

> Actually our space and bandwidth needs are not huge compared with
> today's capabilities, but you're right they coudl scale.  

They could scale, and already they are not small.  The 0.08 release
tarball is 19MB.  Now, granted, having the DMS in place will remove a
lot of redundancy, bringing that down to maybe 5-6 MB, but it's going
to climb from there, and by all indications it's going to climb rather
steadily for a significant while.  Any time we do a widely-publicised
release (or just get slashdotted), that could potentially mean a few
thousand downloads in a few hours.  In a year, if the release tarball
is (say) 30MB, we could be looking at a few hundred gigabytes of
transfer in a handful of hours.

Granted, on a more typical day, it won't be that high.

> More importantly is our need for being able to easily upgrade and
> add new scripts and tools.

Yes, quite so.  In particular, we need to be able to install modules
off the CPAN without bugging an admin.  (It's okay if we can only
install them in our own project's directory, though, like on fdo; I
don't think any of the XS modules we rely on are going to need to be
upgraded all that often.)

> Well, one approach I've been thinking of is to identify a 'master'
> server where we conduct all document commits, etc.  We rsync the
> browsable documents, website, etc. from the master server to one or
> more mirrors.

This seems to me like the right approach for now, because it will be a
lot easier to make work right.  Later if we get to the point where we
have so many commits that it becomes a problem, we could explore
options, such as...

> New uploads would need to be done on the master server for now.
> Some day we can set it up such that users can upload files to the
> mirror and have them propagated to the central server.  This will be
> particularly handy for folks in other countries, so they get a quick
> site to browse and upload to (in their own language), and the
> clipart gets propagated back to the server and out to all the
> mirrors in a reasonably short amount of time.

such as that.  But I suspect that for a while, having one master
server where all the commits take place will probably not be a
problem (unless the master server is down).

Oh, and I recently found something that is not directly related in any
significant way to our project but may be of interest.  A while back
we had a thread about a photo collection site, along similar lines as
our project but for photos.  I found another one -- sxc.hu -- so if we
start getting a lot of photo submissions, that's another place we
could redirect them (though I don't know that this has been an issue
so far).  It seems to be pretty nice, for what it is.

-- 
$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,"ten.thgirb\@badanoj$/ --";$\=$ ;-> ();print$/