Re: I was wondering why fedora has choosen yum over apt-get

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva redhat com>]

On Feb 10, 2004, "Charles R. Anderson" <cra WPI EDU> wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 10, 2004 at 07:41:12PM -0200, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>> Unless I misunderstand, the one gotcha is the common case of a small
>> changes in a large repositories requiring the entire set of (single
>> file) header information to be downloaded.  This *could* become a
>> bandwidth problem, not only for people in the wrong ends of small
>> pipes, but also for servers, since rhn-applet would probably keep on
>> fetching it over and over (at least every time it changes).

> As opposed to fetching the entire directory listing to see if new
> files have appeared or changed?  It is much faster to determine if a
> single, known file name, has changed.

Not as opposed to.  If there was a single small file containing
references to the others, fine, that's ok to update every time.  But
having a single file that's a collection of all the headers, no matter
how compressed it is, it's probably too much info to download every
time it changes.  It appears to me that having the headers available
for separate downloads would be better, even if they're *also*
available in a highly-compressed format for a speedy initial
download.  But then, mirrors lose on disk space.  One can't win, I
guess.  Unless...  rproxy (rsync-based web cache) anyone?

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Happy GNU Year!                     oliva {lsd ic unicamp br, gnu.org}
Red Hat GCC Developer                 aoliva {redhat com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist                Professional serial bug killer