Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2003 14:04:39 +0100 From: ian j hart <ianjhart@ntlworld.com> To: Malcolm Kay <Malcolm.Kay@internode.on.net>, Brooks Davis <brooks@one-eyed-alien.net> Cc: stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 4.8-Release disk3 and disk4 Message-ID: <200304121404.40091.ianjhart@ntlworld.com> In-Reply-To: <200304121547.06679.Malcolm.Kay@internode.on.net> References: <20030407194038.GA18372@qcislands.net> <20030411215257.GA23072@Odin.AC.HMC.Edu> <200304121547.06679.Malcolm.Kay@internode.on.net>
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On Saturday 12 April 2003 7:17 am, Malcolm Kay wrote: > On Sat, 12 Apr 2003 07:22, Brooks Davis wrote: > > On Fri, Apr 11, 2003 at 08:03:04PM +0100, ian j hart wrote: > > > What exactly is "the effort involved". The packages are already built, > > > right? > > > > Solving a more complicated[0] form of the nice little NP-complete > > problem known as bin packing. > > > > -- Brooks > > > > [0] This variant adds a dependency graph problem so how large a package > > is, depends on what other packages are already there. It also requires > > that you assign values to each package to determine which ones have the > > highest priority since you can't fit them all on anything short of a > > dual layer DVD (and I don't expect that to hold much longer). I'd be > > fairly suprised if you could find two people who gave the ranked > > ordering of the importance of the seven thousand plus ports. > > With the increasing prevalence of broadband internet connections the loss > of packages from the distribution is of reduced importance. > > On the other hand the normal hard disk capacity has increased enormously > so it is usually feasible to transfer the all packages from a distribution > to harddisk, where upon the dependency tree problem, I believe, largely > disappears. Perhaps unsorted distributions would be a better compromise. > > Malcolm Kay Yeah, if it's not do-able, don't do it :)) A couple of things spring to mind. I wanted a set of disks for advocacy. I'd much rather burn "the official disk set" than something I threw together myself. The "download only what you want" arguement doesn't apply in this case. Surely it's less load on the servers to download 2 or three big files rather than 8000 odd files, some very small (eg Perl stuff). -- ian j hart Quoth the raven, bite me! Salem Saberhagen (Episode LXXXI: The Phantom Menace)
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