Re: haiku + suggestion

[Jim Kingdon <kingdon@panix.com>]

First of all, welcome to the overseers list, Drew.  That you took the
initiative to show up here is a good sign.

I'll let Chris, Jeff, and Tom take the lead in terms of coming up with
a proposal or defining a strategy or that kind of thing.  But here's
my two cents as a non Red Hat employee who would kind of like to
remain at least somewhat involved in sources.redhat (as an aside, today
was my first day working for sourceforge.net - very interesting).

As for links between the Developer Network and sources.redhat, please
suggest specific links (diffs to the HTML is best) you think would
make sense.  There are a lot of parts of sources.redhat and I'm sure
there are places where a link to an informative resource relevant to
that page would be both helpful and appropriate (other parts, notably
gcc.gnu.org, need to be more paranoid on the "appropriate" front, and
I'm sure that pages like GDB or whatever have plenty of shades of
grey.  But it helps a lot if the link makes sense content-wise - like
the various links at the bottom of the GDB page to netwinder.org,
sourceforge, and other "commercial" sites).  Heck, if you start
submitting changes you are in danger of getting checkin access to the
sources.redhat pages :-).

I'll start the ball rolling on the "copy-editing/suggestion exchange"
by saying that http://www.redhat.com/devnet/tools/gdb/jindex.html has
a link to sourceware.cygnus.com which should be updated to
sources.redhat.com (well, I'd suggest a search-and-replace across
www.redhat which seems easier than trying to mention each of the ones
I stumbled across).  Similarly on
http://www.redhat.com/devnet/tools/gcj/maillist.html it should link to
gcc.gnu.org not gcc.cygnus.com.

As for infrastructure, certainly there are things we need.  More
bandwidth is the obvious one (not that this is a simple matter unless
more $$$ has suddenly appeared; we are currently maxxed out on our T1
and could probably consume roughly two T1's simply by raising the FTP
user limit).  One "creative solution" I'd like to mention (again) is
mirroring our FTP site on priority.redhat.com which I think would be a
win for all involved but I didn't get the idea that priority.redhat
really wanted to deal with that kind of traffic.  And I don't know
that people here have a particularly strong opinion about things like
hardware.  We're very concerned about reliability.  But I hope and
trust that you are too so perhaps that one could have gone without
saying.

Software infrastructure is another matter.  To give an example, and at
the risk of nit-picking or something like that, our mailing list
archives on sources.redhat are nicer than the ones on www.redhat.  And
sources.redhat delivers the mail on time (neither snow, nor sleet, nor
....).  As someone who has been on mailing lists which take hours to
deliver messages, believe me, having them delivered in less than a
minute (typically) changes the whole experience for the better.  If
unifying software infrastructure is a two way process in which those
of us who built sources.redhat get to help improve www.redhat, I think
there is a great possibility here to help out both sites.  But people
are going to be nervous about losing what we have on sources.redhat
(at least, I am nervous...).

So overall, let's try to focus on getting cool things done (I just
looked at the Developer Network for the first time in months and saw a
lot of great stuff there).  If we can keep our eyes on that goal, and
avoid putting up obstacles to winning, we should do fine.