Re: Some little proposals...

[Naba Kumar <kh_naba yahoo com>]

Germano Rizzo wrote:

> Hi!
>     I'm a linux user, and I'm very fond of GNOME... As many people, I guess,
> I "only" have a 56k modem, with a dialup connection that I pay...

Consider my case. we have "one" dialup connection (33kbps) and is shared
by 30 computers!. On an average the connection fails 20 times in a day
(mostly when I am in the middle of a download or upload).


> and not so
> cheap, in particular for a student. I'm disappointed with two details of the
> current GNOME distribution system, and IMHO they could be helped with small
> effort!
>     First of all, I'm referring to the packages I can find on ftp.gnome.org
> etc, not the helix/ximian ones, which are often a little bit outdated...
>     First, why not to use the bzip2 to compress the packages? It compress
> far better than gzip, even 700k less in some packages, and it's a standard
> just like gzip, nowadays... changing the "Source" field of the specfile
> makes it possible to build an RPM also from that, and also the resulting
> source RPM is thus smaller than the one built from a gzip tarball... and I
> guess that with a few changes to the scripts it could be realized some
> target "make bzdist" to create it directly... I think all the people who
> attempt to download the sources and compile them are basically skilled in
> the fundamentals of Linux/Unix, so they should know how to use, or where to
> get, bzip2...

Idea is great, but I think creating a target bzdist with makefile is the job
of automake developers and not the gnome developers. Am I right?


>     Second, the patch distribution system seems quite random... I mean,
> there are patches to pass from a version to another only for few programs,
> and they don't cover all the versions... I do know that not all the changes
> can be diff-ed, but IMHO with a little bit of attention when modifying the
> application, they could be considerably more...

>     I don't write this with the intent to be pesky, but only because at the
> moment, it's impossible for me (and many other people, I guess) to take the
> pace of the GNOME project... I just can't download many megabites one day,
> and the following day discover that I have to download all over again... and
> this for many more than a couple packages!! I know that it is endemic in a
> project of this ambition, but I just wanted to suggest how an user's pain
> can be eased with a small effort... just my 2 cents! :)

I have a suggestion here. We can go for a "Gnome source upgrader" which will
upgrade
the source tree in our computers with diffs of the latest Gnome releases. The
upgrader will identify the Gnome release in our computers (I am refering to
the source tarballs and not rpm packages) and then get the necessary diffs
from the server, extract the tarballs, apply the paches in right order and
then gzip them (or bzip them :-)).

This way only the fist download will take *lots* of time. The following
upgrade will only take only *little* time as only the diffs will be downloaded.

There are many upgraders (eg Helix updater, Ezael updater etc ), but
they work with rpm packages. They actually download the whole
binary of all the packages, which if considered, technically, is *very*
inefficient way of utilizing the available bandwidth.

Gnome release team can automate the process of generating diffs of
all the packages in the gnome release and then they can keep them
in seperate dir, for example, gnome-1.4rc1-diffs/ dir.



--

Regards,
-Naba

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The sun never sets on those who ride into it.

-- RKO
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