Re: Diety UI draft
On Thu, 31 Jul 1997, Behan Webster wrote:
> > Option#2Con#2: Some users might want to retain downloaded packages.
> > (e.g., users with very slow downloading capabilities
> > and sufficient local space (online or offline) may want
> > to keep downloaded packages around against possible future
> > needs once they've been downloaded very slowly). This
> > option doesn't seem to address those users' needs.
>
> The ftp access method is not meant to be used for this. It is meant
> soley for upgrading your machine from a remote source of deb packages.
> To keep a local copy of deb packages, I suggest users check out
> the mirror package. Deity has been designed as a package manager,
> not a mirror program.
But mirror doesn't have the nice diety UI ;-).
Seriously, though, let's take a look at my case. I get 100-400
bytes/sec ftp transfer rates on large files, depending on network
conditions at the time. 200 bytes/sec is typical. The Debian
binary distribution is about 400MB. If I want half of it (and
manually devise a very long regex to tell mirror what I want),
that's 200MB. At 200 bytes/sec, that's a million seconds, or
277 hours, or 11 days. Actually, though, I could probably only
tie up the phone for less than 10 hours per day for downloading,
which would extend the downloading time to about a month.
So, what do I do? Well, for unstable, I try to identify critical
files and ftp them individually. For stable distributions (or
in the later developmental stages in an unstable distribution)
I order CDs, get what I can off them, and use ftp to update
whatever else I need package-by-package.
But manually keeping abreast of which of my packages need updating
is a chore, and an error-prone one at that. Diety will help
me with that chore. With diety having put together a list of
upgrade packages which I need, It would be nice if it would also
help me in doing the download.
In order to make that workable, I'm going to need to be able to select
some subset of the needed packages and tell diety to download those. If
diety says I need 20MB of upgrade packages, that's 27 hours of
downloading. That cannot be done in one sitting. I'll want to get the
packages which are most critical to me first, and the others in
reasonable-sized batches. I'll want to be able to select packages from
those which diety has identified as needing upgrade, and have diety go get
the the selected ones.
Even if I can do this, though, you tell me above that diety will discard
those laboriously-downloaded packages after installation because it's not
meant for downloading packages to be retained:
> The ftp access method is not meant to be used for this. It is meant
> soley for upgrading your machine from a remote source of deb packages.
Having spent 27 hours downloading those 20MB of packages, and
having offline storage capability, I want to keep those laboriously
(or expensively) downloaded packages around. I'll store them
offline if I need to, but I want to avoid having to download
them multiple times (I do sometimes remove packages, and want to
reinstall them later).
Or is diety meant to be useful only for those with fast net access
facilities?
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