Hey folks! Anyone paying attention to the Project Coconut box logs
might've noticed it failed when it tried to run against Alpha TC5. The
problem is to do with the download URLs. I wrote fedfind to always use
https://download.fedoraproject.org/ URLs for mirror HTTP downloads,
but this turns out not to work great for TCs/RCs because of mirror
lag, people (and Coconut) want the images immediately but mirrors
don't pick them up for a few hours after the TC/RC is cut.
I think the problem is different. (Almost) nobody mirrors TCs/RCs. There are about 3
mirrors in the whole world which follow stage/ directory:
http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?path=/pub/alt/stage
Also, you would need to ask infrastructure folks, but I don't think download.fp.o can
be used for this. I think it redirects to a random close mirror without actually checking
the path you are requesting. If you wanted to be sure that the file is present, you would
need to make calls like these in advance:
http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?path=/pub/alt/stage/22_Alpha_...
Those calls are quite slow and probably expensive. And they change in time, you can't
use them immediately after TC/RC is published. So, for anything under stage/, I believe
using dl.fp.o is the best (and only) choice.