On Friday 09 September 2005 17:03, Mike McCarty wrote: > Lamar Owen wrote: > > Do you understand how annoyingly arrogant you sound? I am not a child, > > Bryan. > You aren't a child, but you are naive. You seem intelligent, but, > I hope you won't get offended, as I mean no offence, you are very > ignorant. Remember, ignorance, like epoxy, can be cured. There is > no cure for stupidity. And I don't think that you are stupid. Well, let me just put it this way. I maintained the PostgreSQL RPMs, doing releases and such, for over five years. This is an issue I have thought long and hard about, since a full set of PostgreSQL RPMs is over 10MB. There were many times a bugfix would come from upstream, and it would be maybe a hundred bytes of compiled object code, touching maybe half a dozen object files. But then, due to the interdependencies, because of a HUNDRED BYTE CHANGE users had to pull down nearly TEN MEGABYTES of code. That, my friend, is what is ludicrous. There has got to be a better way. The existing 'glorified wget' as you put it isn't really the greatest solution on earth; up2date and the RHN backend (with the XMLRPC stuff) is probably a better one for delivery of this kind of thing. An RHN-workalike backend in the form of current is available. But the space and bandwidth issues will only get worse; when a full update to KDE comes down, it may be sparked by a change of a few kilobytes up to a megabyte of actual binary change, but then it requires hundreds of megabytes downloaded (and MIRRORED!) to fix. Or tens of bytes change in OpenOffice.org; now you're downloading hundreds of megabytes for a kilobyte binary change. That is ridiculous. No, I am not ignorant of the issues, and I know far better than to think the issues are trivial; they are not. But they are not 'unfeasible' as Bryan put it, and just saying 'that's ludicrous, don't even bother!' is even more ridiculous. I am not a novice; I would like to think I am not ignorant. I may be guilty of being optimistic in that I think the open source community can solve this problem. Are you going to tell the community that this is an unsolvable problem? -- Lamar Owen Director of Information Technology Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute 1 PARI Drive Rosman, NC 28772 (828)862-5554 www.pari.edu