On Fri, Aug 02, 2002 at 03:07:01PM +0200, Sven LUTHER wrote: > This should not be hapenning, as it is very annoying for people with > slow modems, not to speak about people who will be installing from a > cd or another offline method. I've complained about this before. Debian has solved this problem the same way it solves most - the maintainers argued whose fault it is and nobody wanted to take responsibility for fixing it. libxml needs a catalog to avoid most network access (I say most because while I now have one, it apparently doesn't include everything I need. And since I don't actually KNOW what I need because nobody had the good sense to document it, I'd have to go digging through each and every XML file Gnome includes looking for the DTDs used..) libxml does not create this catalog. Apparently the DTD packages need to do this. But without triggers, how can they do so without libxml? Oh, they'd have to depend on libxml then wouldn't they? Or some nice tool to do this automatically when libxml or a DTD is installed would need to be created ala update-menus. Maybe if it were created, it'd even work! It hasn't been done yet. Of course, this is orthoginal to the problem that modem users get NO WARNING that their modem will be busy TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES PER PACKAGE downloading essentially the same DTDs over and over again. Apparently the few seconds tetex-* spend rebuilding files is enough to deserve a warning about how long it'll take, but updating scrollkeeper isn't at almost half an hour a pop for ... how many Gnome2 packages use scrollkeeper? Almost all of them! Not that this has sane defaults on a machine without any network connection whatsoever. Apparently if you're too cheap/poor/paranoid to keep your box connected to the net, you don't deserve to use Gnome2 in Debian. The consensus of this list is that scrollkeeper's behavior is broken and should be fixed upstream. Jeff Waugh has indicated this isn't going to happen. I've concluded that the developers don't really have a grasp of how much this hurts those of us on modem connections. That or they just don't care about the problem enough to be serious about finding some real solution to it NOW, before they force every single Debian user with a modem to put up with their inability or unwillingness to fix it. I wish upon them the thousands of duplicate bug reports which will hopefully follow from this as angry users discover that it takes three hours of modem time to upgrade their machines, AFTER they have downloaded all of the packages! The Europeans on this list have good reason to demand that Gnome2 stay the hell OUT OF UNSTABLE until this is fixed unless and until either the problem is fixed or the people in so great a hurry to push these packages into unstable offer to pay the scrollkeeper-update portion of their phone bills. It's rather amusing that two of the three most obnoxiously aggressive people pushing for Gnome2 in unstable RIGHT NOW are European and should in theory at least already be sensitive to the time and cost of running scrollkeeper. Maybe they are and I just don't see it - but if they are, they are not sensitive enough to it that they've actually put a real effort into fixing the problem. Me, pissed off about it all? Hmmm, what was your first clue? -- Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@bluecherry.net> Do not write in this space <Oskuro> Overfiend: many patches on top of 4.0.1 already? <Overfiend> Oskuro: a few <Overfiend> only 152 megs
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