Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 17:51:08 -0500 (EST) From: Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu> To: hubs@FreeBSD.org, doc@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: [mirror@xyz.lcs.mit.edu: xyz.lcs.mit.edu 6-hour mirror update] Message-ID: <200302202251.h1KMp8ix005755@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> In-Reply-To: <20030220220628.GJ6403@clan.nothing-going-on.org> References: <200209031754.g83HsZUp010035@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> <20030220220628.GJ6403@clan.nothing-going-on.org>
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 <<On Thu, 20 Feb 2003 22:06:28 +0000, Nik Clayton <nik@FreeBSD.org> said: >> [I wrote:] >> Is it really necessary to touch more than a thousand files with such >> frequency, particularly when the source files have not changed at all? > Is this a problem, when using rsync? It doesn't matter what protocol one is using; the problem is one of burying administrators under a blizzard of irrelevant changes. I rarely ever look at the mirror reports for the period when the docs are updated because I have to plow through 1000 lines of crap to see anything I might remotely care about. >> For that matter, is it really necessary that there *be* nine different >> versions of the same document? > I don't know. I have no stats on the relative popularity of the various > formats when it comes to downloads. Over the past five days, almost all of the FreeBSD/doc/ activity on my FTP server is from people using FTP-based mirror software. I see three requests over that period from non-bulk downloaders (identified as anyone who doesn't get all four compression formats): /ftp/pub/FreeBSD/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/book.pdf.zip /ftp/pub/FreeBSD/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/book.pdf.zip /ftp/pub/FreeBSD/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/book.html-split.tar.zip The Web server does not see any activity over a similar period for doc. > HTML, split HTML, PS, and PDF are probably fundamental formats. I see no need for more than one HTML version. PostScript and PDF are (in this particular case, given how they are generated) semantically equivalent; having the PostScript version serves no useful purpose. > Plain text was asked for numerous times. There is some value in the plain text for people with traditional FTP clients who just want to use `more'. > RTF is for people who are thinking about FreeBSD, and want to (for > whatever reason) read the docs in Word (or similar). I know, it sounds > weird (why not just use PDF?), but that's what was requested multiple > times on -doc. Must... resist... fist... of... death.... > Multiply that by three for the Gzip, Bzip, and Zip version. Can we > remove any of them? Probably not. Gzip and Zip both have their uses, > and the BZip format is generally shaves a multiple-tens of K when used. gzip and zip are (effectively) the same format. If there's only one file in the ZIP archive, gunzip can deal with it just fine. I see no evidence that the bzip(2) format is being used at all, and the resources wasted by putting it on all the mirrors are probably more than it would save a user looking for a document (most of whom are going to get it from the Web anyway). > Then there's the pkg_add'able versions, which are just good sense. Well, they don't make any sense at all to me, so you'll have to justify that a bit more. - -GAWollman -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (FreeBSD) iD8DBQE+VVZJI+eG6b7tlG4RAsPmAKCAEMP96QMmOWF8M7hw45GU9M5tUwCeOivK m6Bc0sgEjYCN0iwuKvoeM9s= =trHX -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --h1KMROjk005528.1045780044/khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu-- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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