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Compression (Developers)

posted by marcov, 15.04.2008, 15:43

> > How long do you think it is responsible to hold everything up, and stop
> > packaging new stuff, because a few remaining dialup users are holding
> you
> > hostage ?
>
> Not long. But nobody is holding anybody hostage either. There is still the
> question, How many users are you willing to leave behind?
Dial-uppers? both of them :-)

Seriously, if it turns out to be a problem, they can turn to distributions on magazine CDs (e.g. the German language area is already covered that way, and nearly any higher educational system has it somewhere anyway (due to Informatics Olympiad using it).

I believe they used to be on sale at some global site too, but haven't checked that in a while, since that is in generally better left to local initiatives (since otherwise postage will be larger than actual costs)

If it then still is a problem, I assume the dial-upers will set up a cut down distribution. But as said, we don't have any indications that it is a problem, otherwise we would have lobbyed cheapbytes and clones more.

> > Note that these kinds of reasons are the main reasons why more and more
> > large OSS projects are going the netinstaller direction, even though
> that
> > has additional problems too.
>
> Yeah, like if/when your server goes down, all your users will hate you.
Not really. Most open source installsystems work with a local dir. This also avoids redownload since you can simply place that on a network share, and all pkgs are versioned, so only new ones are updated. By using http protocol you minimize proxy/firewall problems anyway.

In an emergency network situation you can install entirely from local pkgs, at the small expense of the risk of installing outdated stuff.

See e.g cygwin.

> Actually, the dialup thing wasn't my main concern, but I'll note a few
> solutions anyway.
>
> 1) Big parts of release packages are old. Build small packages with
> updates only (actually good for any users).
But what updates exactly? There is btw also still a public SVN server (when I was on dialup I used CVS mostly too)

> 2) Sell CDs with the full kit. Easy, might make some real money too. Even
> people who have fast connections can appreciate the time and work they
> save by not having to burn and test their own CDs.
See above. That and more already done. We don't want to sell CDs ourselves currently, since there is no webshop knowledge in core. But the main point is that we don't have any indications that this is currently an huge problem.

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