Re: Size matters. Debian binary package stats
On Sun, Dec 18, 2005 at 08:41:03AM -0500, Roberto Sanchez wrote:
>> - CPU doesn't grow nearly as fast as those three.
> In 1995 I had a Pentium 166 and a 56 kbps modem. Now, today the fastest
> CPU you can get from Intel is 3.6 GHz. However, the fastest dial modem
> you can get today is still 56k (remember that the majority of people
> worldwide are still on dial up). That means that for a 2200% increase
> in the maximum speed of a consumer-grade processor, there has a been 0%
> increase in the maximum speed of a dial up modem. A similar phenomenon
> has occurred for disk space.
So? We're talking “bandwidth”, not “dial-up modem bandwidth” -- thankfully,
the world is progressing, and we're moving away from dial-up at lightning
speeds. :-) In 1995 I had a 28.800 modem -- today, I have 6Mbit at about the
same price (probably a bit lower). That's a 21300% increase to match your
2200% increase :-)
Not to mention that a DVD-R can fit about three million times as much data as
a floppy disk, which was the dominant way of distributing software at the
time. We can continue keep playing these number games, but I don't really see
the point :-)
> If we focus our energy on anything to reduce bandwidth, it should be
> making apt/dpkg smart enough to only need to grab the single changed
> binary package out of the 50 produced by source package foo, or maybe to
> employ and rsync-like approach.
Splitting packages makes sense for this sort of thing, and X did just that.
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