On Fri, Sep 10, 2021 at 09:33:56AM +0200, Helmut Grohne wrote:
Laptops of end-user systems are the target, but also developers. When people gather at a place (conference, hackspace, private meetup, etc.) downloading of .debs should just work quickly by default. Many such sites could easily provide a local cache and a number even do. BSPs tend to have a blackboard with information including the local mirror to use. Seriously, how many people change their mirror when they go to a BSP? If we installed auto-apt-proxy by default, much of the local caching would just work.
I think you'd get a lot of pushback on installing auto-apt-proxy by default. If that's a proposal, make it seperately and not in this thread.
The thing we seem to be disagreeing on is what is more important? https by default or quick and efficient downloads? Some may think that our CDN can handle the load just fine and the effects of caching are peanuts. I can attest that those peanuts are 4TB/year (equivalent to 8 days waiting for downloads) for me.
I see that we've given up on a global network of independently-managed mirrors and that CDNs are way easier at this time. While initially CDNs had bad reliability issues, those have completely vanished in my experience. On the other hand, local caching still outperforms CDNs by a factor of 10 or so. I'd love to make it the default.
I use a cache out of habit and to be a good netizen, but my internet connection is fast enough these days that it's basically a noop at best and a slight slowdown at worst. I had to move the cache from slow/cheap spinning disk to reasonably fast SSD to get to that point. If you're downloading the same stuff over and over (e.g., for testing or somesuch) it can be a big win, especially for VMs on a virtualized network connection, or if you're managing a large infrastructure, but for normal use with a couple of instances? It's just not worth the trouble.