Suggestion for data packages
Since we are discussing how to handle data, including many documents. Why
not use something similar to FreeBSD's ports? That is, we provide a
utility that will download the data from its source (using a link that we
provide to an ftp archive somewhere), check its md5sum, extract the data,
and install it in the appropriate place in the filesystem. In addition,
as a service to our users, we can mirror much of this data on a Debian ftp
server (and this data can also be distributed on CDs), but such a mirror
is not necessary.
Such a mechanism has two advantages: (1) we can provide support for much
more data than we can mirror ourselves, thereby saving space in our data
collection for the really important stuff, and (2) it is far easier to
maintain a reference (link) to something than to repackage and mirror it,
especially in terms of network and disk resources.
Brian
Reply to: