The problem with the file centric approach is that it is a radical
departure from the system that's in place at the moment (the system
being more than software: it's the whole process
of creating packages, testing and managing all that).
I think if this feature has any chance of making it into Fedora it
must be implemented as a layer on-top of the software that's already
there.
Joe.
On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 14:25:25 -0500, Paul A. Houle <ph18(a)cornell.edu> wrote:
If we were designing this kind of system as if users
mattered, it might
make more sense to make it files-centric rather than rpm-centric. I
really hate the idea of making the system count on having rpms available,
because I'm not so good about keeping the original disks around. (Plus
the survival of optical disks is hit-or-miss. I've had some disks that
lasted 8 years after getting treated with moderate care, and I've had
other ones that I couldn't read after walking them across campus.)
It seems just as feasable to send diffs of the ~files~ rather than diffs
of the ~rpms~; if we're going to go through the bother of implementing
something like this, it makes sense to make something that "just works"
rather than another one of these things that almost works (or rather,
works if you have the disks, works if you are ready to pull the disks out
if you have yum, kinda might work if you have a network install, maybe
it won't work.)
This should be thought of as an optimization. If the files on the
disk don't checksum match the rpm database, we ought to download and
install the new rpm.
----
I've always wondered if the Red Hat Network would have been more
profitable if it had been less wasteful of bandwidth.
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