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Date: Thu, 9 Feb 1995 05:11:56 -0800
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh>
Message-Id: <199502091311.FAA09172@freefall.cdrom.com>
To: hackers
Subject: Please?  Whine..  Sup project..
Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

What can I say, despite the much sung praises of CTM, sup seems alive
and well.  Alive and slow, anyway, which is what I'm whining about.
A number of you folks stay in sync with us by supping the src, cvs or
ports trees but I don't think that many of you have really actually
ever looked at how horribly inefficient sup is at this kind of thing! ;(
It takes very bad advantage of low bandwidth lines (look at your modem
sometime - very poor utilization!) by not batching transfers and there's
no true checksumming of files.  sup needs a face lift!  It needs somebody
to sit down and profile both the client and the server, stare at the
data gathered for awhile, think about the problem in general, then sit
down and whack out an extention to/replacement for sup as a source
tree synchronization protocol!

Poul-Henning will scream "CTM!" at this point, so let me also just
answer that in advance and say that if somebody wants to work on putting
a front-end onto CTM so that you can sync with the current tree at any
arbitrary time, then that's fine by me.  I don't care how it's done, just so
long as they can do it all in batch mode or on demand with one simple
command and a configuration file.

I'd still like to see sup improved, if sup is to survive as an option.
A lot of people say they like sup and that's fine.  What would be finer,
however, (and make more sense) would be for the sup devotees to come
together now and decide what the next generation sup is going to look
like.  I'll give you guys some hints:

	1) It has to be trustworthy (md5)
	2) It has to make optimum use of available bandwidth (fast)
	3) It has to make minimal demands on the server (not murder freefall)
	4) It has to be easy to set up.

Right now, sup is none of those 4 things.  You have your work cut out for
you - I'd get started now! :-)

				Jordan