Thanks for the question. It’s a good one.
I’m not making any extended commitments for the snapshot repositories yet so for now let’s assume that final snapshots will expire just like any other. Because we don’t remove EOL distros from the main repositories, once a distro goes EOL it’s final snapshot would be nearly equivalent to the state of the main repositories (except releases of the python utilties: rosdep, rosdistro, bloom, etc). There are two overarching reasons we’re not making an extended commitment out the gate.
- I want to leave myself room to iterate, including breaking changes like urls, and the six month lifespan allows me to do that gracefully.
- The cost to maintain these snapshots indefinitely, both in storage and bandwidth is not something we can responsibly commit to without having a better idea of what that cost will be. Before releasing this I did some back-of-the-envelope estimates but none of it replaces real-world data. So as we add more snapshots I’ll be looking at the growth rate of our storage consumption and at the bandwidth consumption and that will inform how this service evolves.