On Friday 09 September 2005 17:03, Mike McCarty wrote:
> Lamar Owen wrote:
> > Do you understand how annoyingly arrogant you sound? I am not a child,
> > Bryan.
> You aren't a child, but you are naive. You seem intelligent, but,
> I hope you won't get offended, as I mean no offence, you are very
> ignorant. Remember, ignorance, like epoxy, can be cured. There is
> no cure for stupidity. And I don't think that you are stupid.
Well, let me just put it this way. I maintained the PostgreSQL RPMs, doing
releases and such, for over five years. This is an issue I have thought long
and hard about, since a full set of PostgreSQL RPMs is over 10MB. There were
many times a bugfix would come from upstream, and it would be maybe a hundred
bytes of compiled object code, touching maybe half a dozen object files. But
then, due to the interdependencies, because of a HUNDRED BYTE CHANGE users
had to pull down nearly TEN MEGABYTES of code. That, my friend, is what is
ludicrous. There has got to be a better way.
The existing 'glorified wget' as you put it isn't really the greatest solution
on earth; up2date and the RHN backend (with the XMLRPC stuff) is probably a
better one for delivery of this kind of thing. An RHN-workalike backend in
the form of current is available.
But the space and bandwidth issues will only get worse; when a full update to
KDE comes down, it may be sparked by a change of a few kilobytes up to a
megabyte of actual binary change, but then it requires hundreds of megabytes
downloaded (and MIRRORED!) to fix. Or tens of bytes change in
OpenOffice.org; now you're downloading hundreds of megabytes for a kilobyte
binary change. That is ridiculous.
No, I am not ignorant of the issues, and I know far better than to think the
issues are trivial; they are not. But they are not 'unfeasible' as Bryan put
it, and just saying 'that's ludicrous, don't even bother!' is even more
ridiculous.
I am not a novice; I would like to think I am not ignorant. I may be guilty
of being optimistic in that I think the open source community can solve this
problem. Are you going to tell the community that this is an unsolvable
problem?
--
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC 28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu
