Re: [gentoo-dev] making metadata.xml pay off and removing pkg_postinst crud

[Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org>]

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On Fri, 2003-08-15 at 00:14, Chris Smith wrote:
> The <howto> section could even include links to Gentoo (or just general) 
> documentation! i.e. hardened-sources could point to the hardened gentoo 
> project page. Perhaps even topics in the forum, or the mailing list, where 
> users have documented useful info about the package.

I really like this idea.  It gives quite a bit more information to the
users and isn't too hard to maintain from a developer standpoint.

> Off on a tangent here, perhaps all of our information distributed via rsync, 
> could be bzipped? I'm not familiar with rsync, or if it's anything like cvs 
> (i.e. unable to handle binaries the way we want), but we could definately 
> reduce the download times over rsync (something i've noticed, especially for 
> the first rsync done on a system).

For portage usage, rsync works best with straight text.  This is because
a bzipped file is dramatically different from the previous version if
only one character changed before compression.  The download times, I
believe, are more a product of the actual matching done by rsync than a
product of slow download rates.  I've noticed that a sync is about 100
fold faster on a SCSI RAID array than on an old IDE drive, though both
are on the same Internet connection.  This tells me right away that
bandwidth is not the problem, but rather I/O (and CPU to an extent).

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Developer, Gentoo Linux

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