On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 21:08, Larry Vaden vaden@texoma.net wrote:
On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 9:51 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia nkadel@gmail.com wrote:
I've repeatedly seen this sort of "I can do it better myself, just the way I think it should work!" with system auditing tools, source control systems, and software building structures. It's usually far, far more efficient to learn the existing structure well and build on it than to start from scratch: a lot of hardwon lessons are very expensive to relearn.
And, since I've been around since the ASR 33 days of paper tape when you had to really think straight and maintain good relations with the operators in order to get 7 compiles a day, I wonder why we still spend time waiting on files to be compressed and to be decompressed when you can't fill up a modern day disk drive with a project's code, much less an array of said drives most modern build systems would have.
Because while disk is cheap, a station wagon full of disks is still cheaper than trying to send over the multiple gigabytes of data over WAN or even most company LAN lines. With various ISPs looking at capping downloads at 1GB/month and extra costs for every GB above that.. it would take someone on that line 6 months to download a basic system without compression. Now if we all could be satisfied running on the same amount of code we did back in the good old days of toggle switches and punch tapes/cards.