Re: OS Future now that Fedora Legacy defunct

On Friday 22 December 2006 12:11, Justin W wrote:
Dave Ihnat wrote:
On Fri, Dec 22, 2006 at 10:32:16AM -0500, Dmitriy Kropivnitskiy wrote:
Basically, AFAIU, you get major version upgrades. For example, FC5
has GNOME 2.14 as the main Desktop. FC6 has 2.16.
FC5 is not going to get 2.16. Ever. It will only get updates for
minor versions.

I think what he's getting at is, why do big-bang releases instead of
simply continually releasing updates via an automatic mechanism such
as yum?

This model has had its proponents over the years. Probably the
biggest reasons you have major releases are:

o A major release gives someone new to the product line a starting
point that isn't horrendously out of date. Ever have to reinstall a
copy of Windows XP from CD, then live through hours of updates?

In my experience though, you *do* have to sit through hours of updates:
the first few months of a release are so hectic with bug fixes that you
end up downloading nearly an entire CD's worth of information in updates
to what you just installed. I can do this because I have DSL that can
run for hours downloading everything, but it won't work for anyone on
dialup.

That brings me to a related question I've wondered for some time: why do
we have to download entire packages for updates? Why can't there be an
RPM package similar to patches? Then you'd only have to download the
difference in a package (and I don't mean a partial file, but just whole
files that have been updates. Most files don't get too large
individually). I would see where this could be a problem if we didn't
have new Fedora Core releases, but since we do, the patch RPMs would
only have to be based off the initial package of that version release.
If any patch RPMs are needed before a particular patch RPM could be
installed, I don't really see why it would be a problem for the patch
RPM's spec file to include a list of dependency patches (much like
packages already do) and have yum automatically download them too.

Justin W

I'd like to second those thoughts. OTOH, if one wants to, I believe the
basic rsync algorithm could be trained to do exactly that. The
disadvantage to that is that one would have to maintain a local rpm
repository of the whole install in order to make that work. But a
scenario where it sucks a list of files that have been updated since the
last time the update was executed, with both the old version and the new
version, and add a bit of code to edit the filename in the repo to match,
possibly just softlinking the new name to the old file, then just run
through it, grabbing what it needs. I could foresee that the network
traffic load might be cut by at least 50%, and possibly as much as 95+%
for simple patch a function upgrades. The user then would simply run
another script that detected the filename update and update-installed the
updated package from the users own repository.

This wouldn't take a lot of 'new' code, and could probably be done by a
python programmer to be fancy, or even a bash script could probably do
it, run at some low load time by cron. The possibilities seem to be well
worth the effort IMO.

Dave Ihnat
President, DMINET Consulting, Inc.
dihnat@xxxxxxxxxx

Thanks for triggering the thought Dave, & Merry Christmas.

--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
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message by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.

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