Re: Tracking KDE on unstable
On Fri, 2001-12-07 at 23:33, Jules Bean wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 08:29:04PM +1300, Andrew McMillan wrote:
> > It seems that tracking KDE on unstable is a huge bandwidth hog - every
> > time I update my system I am faced with a more than 40M download, and it
> > seems that 35M of that is KDE, every time.
> >
> > Is there any sensible reason why so much is changed every time?
>
> Does a technical reason count as sensible? That's just how the
> packages work. Often many packages have to be recompiled together,
> (because of interdepencies, or simply because they come from the same
> source package), and no matter how minor a change, if the maintainer
> decides it justifies a new upload, they all get recompiled...
>
> One can conceive of solutions, but they all require significant
> technical work.
Yes, it does seem a very tight set of interdependencies. I guess
solutions only get found when people notice there is a problem though,
too.
In the last fortnight, kdebase seems to have gone through 6-7 revisions
(no problem with that - these people are obviously keen to keep
everything tickety boo :-)
Looking at my /var/cache/apt/archives and selecting 'all of those
packages with the same revision as kdebase', I find around 16MB in those
packages. Doing the same thing with Gnome (i.e. same version as
'gnome-core') I find a mere 5MB - a much more achievable download.
But looking more closely I see that the version numbers don't exactly
synchronise. 2.2.2-7 is much of the kde stuff that arrived today, but a
fair bit of 2.2.2-5 also arrived, and totalling all of the 2.2.2-5
version on my disk here gives around 25M.
> I've no idea. I'm not aware of any complaints, but I'm not on the
> admin team, so maybe I wouldn't know about them. AFAIK most mirrors
> are donated by organisations and universities whose disk-space and
> bandwidth usage is so large anyway that the mirror is not a big issue.
The Debian mirror in New Zealand is run by a private company. My own
company couldn't afford to, but we do manage to foot the bill to provide
the only New Zealand mirror for the Linux Kernel - it costs us around
$200/month to do that (traffic charges only - other costs are harder to
know).
I have a few dealings with the people who do host the Debian mirror
here, and I do know that they regularly can't keep up with the level of
change in unstable, just generally. Things like this contribute
significantly to their problems.
This may seem like a lone voice in the dark, but it is from places like
New Zealand that these issues will necessarily be raised first.
At current bulk rates in New Zealand, the last two weeks of KDE (say 7
x 25MB updates) would cost a company around $17.50 to bring the traffic
in - not a lot really, only $400 for a whole year, perhaps. Most of the
traffic costs for hosting such sites in New Zealand are actually for the
people who then download from the mirror, costs which the mirror will
pay for in many cases.
Cheers,
Andrew.
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