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Date:      Wed, 1 Feb 1995 05:09:56 +0000 (GMT)
From:      Paul Richards <paul@isl.cf.ac.uk>
To:        jkh@morton.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard)
Cc:        hackers@freefall.cdrom.com
Subject:   Re: sup:  Ok, I'm gonna do it.
Message-ID:  <199502010509.FAA01322@isl.cf.ac.uk>
In-Reply-To: <199501311847.SAA13918@morton.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Jan 31, 95 06:47:55 pm

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NOTE: This has gone to core only.

In reply to Jordan K. Hubbard who said
> 
> Part of the 2.1 install will be a network configution menu, and on that
> menu will be a submenu called `SUP	Configure Software Update Protocol'
> And on THAT submenu will be a couple of items, like so:
> 
> <up>			..  Go back ..
> AboutSUP		All About the Software Update Protocol - READ THIS!
> Register		Register for automatic software updates
> 

I'm not sure this is a good idea. I'm already getting much too much
mail from users who clearly are not capable of running development
code and I'm really not looking forward to that massively increasing
as every new installer takes up your offer to register for sup.

On top of that I think the load on freefall will make it difficult
for the real developers to work.

> If you select Register, it will first confirm that you're on the network
> and then it will ask you to select a sup server, one of which will be
> freefall.cdrom.com.  Are there going to be any others?  If we're going to
> do backup sup sites, then the time to do it is SOON!
> 

This idea scares the hell out of me too since the mirrors aren't under our
control and these are *development* sources we're talking about not a
release.

> And from this point it's off we go.  If they run the sup interactively,
> they can also be asked if they want to go build from the sources and
> then we can do some sort of `make update' thing.  That's the other thing
> we still need to resolve, but we can get back to it later! :-)
> 

You've got to be kidding. The number of times a make world actually
runs, from beginning to end, flawlessly are few and far between.
People *will* try and do this if you offer it to them during installation
and in all likelyhood it'll fall flat on its face most of the time.

In all seriousness, I'm getting more mail than I want from "not
quite" newbies who ask dumb questions like, what do I do after I
sup, how often should I make world and so forth. When you dangle
a carrot like this in front of people they take it and the result
will be that every user on the net will be supping current and
complaining to us when things aren't quite working. We're seeing
quite a lot of this in the mailing lists already because of the
SNAP's, which, incidentally we should put big red warning signs
around since people are getting the wrong impression about them
and expecting them to actually work :-).

Well, you asked for comments :-)
-- 
  Paul Richards, FreeBSD core team member. 
  Phone: +44 1222 874000 x6646 (work), +44 1222 457651 (home)
  Dept. Mechanical Engineering, University of Wales, College Cardiff.
  Internet: paul@FreeBSD.org,  JANET(UK): RICHARDSDP@CARDIFF.AC.UK



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