Jesse Keating wrote:
On Tue, 2009-01-27 at 01:22 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
The problem with this: Users don't notice the cases in which upgrades
"simply work" - They only notice the case, something already has gone wrong.
Many users notice a plethora of updates for unknown reasons that chew up
their bandwidth, cpu, and disk time while they're just trying to get
work done. So much so that many opt out of applying updates at all,
because there are so many of them, which hurts our abilities to deliver
security updates.
These problems do not originate from the number of upgrades/update, they
originate from the _size_ of updates few packages introduce.
People in bandwidth rich situations
Correct.
and with new expensive fast hardware
may not see a problem.
Well, I would label this an urban legend - Updating recent Fedoras using
yum has not been much of a performance problem, even on slower and older
HW (e.g. a 1GHz i686/512MB)
Admitted, on an 64MB/166MHz i586 w/Fedora 10 yum updates tend to be
"really slow".
However, wrt. to bandwidth, I see another problem: Your strategy of
pushing updates in "big batches", instead of "small chunks".
This makes a significant difference to users with limited bandwidth.
While they could easily poll "small chunks", e.g. once a day (blocking
their network for, e.g. 1 hour), the current strategy would block they
network for very much longer (e.g. 7 hours).
Another aspect related to bandwidth: Revisiting
* the sizes of rpms (e.g. different payload compressors).
* differential updates/rpms.
Seems to me as if these once "hot topics" have dropped off the Fedora
radar, in favor of "strangling/nagging the distro's contributors".
Ralf
--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
