Debian Distribution getting too big?
It seems that the speed at which the GPLed Softwareworld is growing is getting
out of hand and that we might need to think about better ways to organize the
mirrors and the distribution system. Take Staroffice for example.
If now the major softwarevendors decide to gpl their products and it is
possible for one debian developer to add a chunk of several hundred Mbyte to
the distribution (this is only one architecture) with reasonable efford, where
will the whole system end up?
The cd-distributions will not be the problem. CDs are really cheap and if the
distributions double in size, so what? It is getting less handy. take a DVD.
But the people who provide for the mirrors might find it suddenly really
expensiv to let people download all this stuff or store it on their local
systems in the first place. Could some of the people who provide both the
bandwidth and the storage shed some light on the costs? I do not know hard
facts here.
A differently organized mirroring strategy comes to mind, where thepackagaes
most often downloaded get distributed further down the hiracy of mirrors and
the seldomly used stuff stays on a few servers. The numbers are there. What
about it?
Reply to: