Fresh Fedora 11 fetches 362MB+ of updates, where's deltaRPM?

[Robert L Cochran]

On 06/12/2009 06:21 PM, Fernando Cassia wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 7:13 PM, Arthur Pemberton <pemboa at gmail.com 
> <mailto:pemboa at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 3:34 PM, Fernando Cassia<fcassia at gmail.com
>     <mailto:fcassia at gmail.com>> wrote:
>     >
>     This isn't a free, infinite resource.
>
>
> If you follow the discussion tree you´ll see that the discussion 
> quickly  morphed in all sort of excuses against DeltaRPMs like "my  
> repository doesn´t implement it so it negates any benefits, switching 
> to another compression  may be better" or that "why don´t we offload 
> cpu usage to the repos" (ridiculous, if someone agrees to host a 
> repository they´re already contributing their bandwidth and ftp/http 
> server, it´s the distros creator´s job to actually, gee, create the RPMs).
>
> FC

As Arthur said this is not a free resource. Someone has to pay for those 
cpu cycles and the network bandwidth. I still remember wayyyyyy back 
when Red Hat the company was building the Red Hat Network -- some here 
may remember it. RHN is still in use but I suspect it is devoted 
entirely to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss customers. I actually 
bought a subscription to RHN back then, which for a short time I could 
use for Red Hat Linux updates. But that download pipe was turned off and 
my subscription I think was refunded on a prorated basis.

I don't know how Fedora pays for all the costs of providing updates, I 
never looked too closely at the funding aspects in fact. But someone out 
there is shelling out big money for this. Someone is paying salaries, 
infrastructure, office space, and more. That is the reality of it. And 
if the donors involved are feeling the economic pinch, they might just 
give less in the way of funding.

In fact I'm quite surprised that Fedora hasn't implemented a paid 
subscription system for release downloads and release updates similar to 
RHN. I know that people interested in downloading the new Eclipse 
Galileo version can pay $30 to a different group of people to get early 
preferential download access to Galileo. Someone paid for the expensive 
hardware and bandwidth to provide premium service with.

Bob Cochran