Hi Mike,

thank you for your comments. They point to an unsatisfactory situation that has existed for a long time, is quietly overlooked, but which needs to be addressed. See comments below.

On Wednesday 17 of April 2019 18:46:23 Mike Bird wrote:

So 14.0.6 was released a few weeks ago and I didn't notice. That's odd. Particularly odd, in fact, as I run the primary TDE mirror. Normally TDE releases are coordinated with the primary TDE mirror in order so ensure a smooth deployment.

Since the beginning of December, we have been looking at the primary site because we wanted to start the process of releasing a new release. But at the beginning of December Tim started a kind of migrations. There was no information from Tim before, during, or after the migration. It was not clear when the primary site would be fully operational again.

At the beginning of March the situation looked good, so we started to build the final packages for R14.0.6. Upon completion of the builds, I published the packages to the official repository and expected to start mirroring to your primary mirror. But then I found that since mid of December the mirroring is not working at all.

I remember you pointed out this problem in December. But we can't do anything about it - only Tim can. We sent information to Tim, reminded several times, but still without success.

The last post to trinity-announce was in August 2018. If there was an announcement of 14.0.6 on -user or -devel I missed it. The web site https://www.trinitydesktop.org/releases.php doesn't list 14.0.6 as a release although there is a mention of 14.0.6 on the home page.

Looking back at the various list archives for March and April I only see a discussion of an Ubuntu LiveCD being updated to 14.0.6 but I had ignored that because we don't run Ubuntu.

Because the packages were published to the official repository and the update could begin to spread to users, we had to send a announce about release R14.0.6.

We can post a message that appears on the TDE home page and is also published in RSS. I also sent the announce to the trinity-announce mailing list. But trinity-announce is moderated and only Tim can approve the post. I've been asking Tim for permission for trinity-announce for me since August, but to this point without success.

I have prepared an update for the website to show the current version R14.0.6. Here is enough to pull commit and apply to the official site. But the only one who can do so is Tim. We sent information to Tim, reminded several times, but still without success.

The same is for source tarballs. Only Tim can make changes to these parts of the archive, which is the basis for the mirror system.

However the redirector http://mirror.ppa.trinitydesktop.org/ seems to have been hijacked to bypass the mirrors in favor of whichever mystery repository has 14.0.6. This of course doesn't help people who have selected a specific mirror for improved performance and consistency.

Redirector makes no mysteries. You can see that R14.0.6 is in the official repository on the primary server (obviously if it is not a day out). Redirector is designed to be very helpful in releasing new releases. Therefore, the redirector serves R14.0.6 packages to users.

If the redirector didn't work in the way he works now, there would be a lot more confusion. You might remember the situation that was usual earlier - users received error 404 when accessing packages or caused an overload of the primary site. I must say that I am glad that this situation is a thing of the past thanks to the redirector.

A bunch of people are paying for and maintaining mirrors that don't have 14.0.6. When were you going to tell us that we are wasting our time and money?

As I wrote at the beginning, current situation is not good.

Here's a series of things we can't do, because Tim is the only one who can. I fully respect that Tim is very busy. But it is very annoyning when for minor tasks such as approval of announce, applying commit to web, we must remind Tim again, again, over and over. Until now, we have not succeeded in a few small tasks that we asked from Tim since August.

I understand that you are angry and you feel that we are wasting your efforts. You should know, that we very much appreciate your efforts. We also want things to happen better. We encounter the above problems more often, not just when the new version is released. And often we also feel lost efforts. Even so, we still try to do the best we can. But there are things that are simply not possible in the current situation. Something has to change.

--Mike

Cheers