Subject: Re: life, the universe, and everything (why rsync?!)
Newsgroups: gmane.linux.gentoo.user
Date: 2003-05-08 13:54:43 GMT (6 years, 8 weeks, 2 days, 18 hours and 8 minutes ago)
As a modem user, your idea of moving portage away from rsync is not welcome at all. Any attempt at tryng to just download differences between portage versions will mean writing a lot of code to duplicate what rsync does very efficiently anyway. Now if someone could just write a routine to update distfile packages with the differences via rsync (ala the Troels rsync update script for mandrake that does ISO updates, it renames existing packages to latest version then syncs them: apparently there is a large saving in BW as changes between versions of a source package may only be a few lines of code, and is usually just as minor in a binary package), us modem users would be even more greatfull! BillK On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 20:30, Rev. Jeffrey Paul wrote: > since i first started using gentoo, the whole concept of using rsync has > seemed incredibly silly to me. > > rsync requires special server and client software, increases loads on the > servers, and significantly limits the number of mirrors (by not being > http/ftp compatible). > > i can understand the reasoning behind rsync when gentoo was starting... it > wasn't an issue of bandwidth and server load and thousands of users. but > now it is. > > "find /usr/portage | wc -l" shows more than forty thousand files in the > portage tree. my /usr/portage, without any distfiles, is over 170MB. > > i have an idea for a good distribution system that would save cpu, > resources, bandwidth, and would allow for easy mirroring and proxying. it > would be scalable and simple to implement, running on top of http/ftp. > > it seems to me that there are no compelling reasons behind gentoo's > continued usage of rsync. > > i'm going to write a draft of my idea for a better portage > synchronization/update system. in the meantime, i'm asking the portage > maintainers/admins: are there _any_ real reasons (other than tradition) > that rsync is still the standard? > > -j > > -------------------------------------------------------- > Rev. Jeffrey Paul -datavibe- sneak <at> datavibe.net > aim:x736e65616b pgp:0x15FA257E phone:8777483467 > 70E0 B896 D5F3 8BF4 4BEE 2CCF EF2F BA28 15FA 257E > -------------------------------------------------------- > > > -- > gentoo-user <at> gentoo.org mailing list -- William Kenworthy <billk <at> iinet.net.au> -- gentoo-user <at> gentoo.org mailing list