Re: New Markets
On Fri, 19 Apr 1996, Bruce Perens wrote:
> > Wouldn't it make more sense to call the directory debian-1.1/ right
> > from the start, and make unstable a symbolic link to it?
>
> We did that once, and will never do it again. Someone put it on their
> CD-ROM as 1.1 a few months ago.
Yes, I'm well aware of that. That broken infomagic disk with alpha 1.0
debian on it was the number one reason why i couldn't recommend Debian
to people who didn't have a good fast net connection.
I think it's the wrong "solution", though.
/home/ftp/debian$ du -s unstable
157434 unstable
What it means is that merely to prevent someone from making a stupid,
easily avoidable mistake all the mirror sites are going to have to
re-fetch about 157MB of stuff that they already have. How many
mirror sites are there? Probably at least 10 connecting directly to
ftp.debian.org, so that's 1.57GB of garbage that gets sent out of
ftp.debian.org unnecessarily.
A better solution would be to post HUGE notices which couldn't possibly
be missed highlighting the fact that the debian-1.1/ (or -1.2/ or
whatever) tree is ALPHA, UNSTABLE, USE AT YOUR OWN RISK IT'S YOUR OWN
FAULT DONT BLAME US.
Also, keep a list of all known linux cd-rom or debian cd-rom producers,
and make sure they get semi-regular announcements of just which version
is current, and how they can get a copy. It would also be a good
idea to specifically mention that the debian-1.x/ contains an alpha,
pre-release version of the next debian release and should not be used.
You can't make anything completely fool-proof, and you shouldn't try.
Anybody who deliberately ignores the huge warning signs deserves the
broken crap that they get. Excuse the phrase, but think of it as
evolution in action.
> What we will do when it is time for the release is to tar the unstable
> directory and extract it into a code-named directory. Then, once the
> mirrors have a chance to catch up, we will set a debian-1.1 symbolic
> link to point at the code-named directory.
Great. So i can look forward to downloading another copy of the 157mb
of the same stuff i've already spent a few days downloading. Too bad if
I want to use my PPP link for anything else while it's happening.
The only way to avoid having all the mirror sites having to waste
bandwidth downloading stuff they already have is to NOT change the
directory name.
Hey, here's another idea:
Set up a second anonymous ftp account, say "deb-anon". Make debian-1.1/
unreadable by "anonymous" but readable by "deb-anon". Those who bother
to find out about the deb-anon account can presumably be trusted to
know the difference between stable & unstable versions. When it's
time to release 1.1 as the latest official version, just change the
ownership/permissions of the directory to let "anonymous" have access to
it.
Can wu-ftpd do this?
Maybe none of this seems relevant to people used to T1 or T3 lines, but
it makes a hell of a lot of sense to me (and probably to anyone else
used to 28.8K modem or 64K ISDN links)
Craig
Reply to: