I didn't read much of this email when I first responded to it since I suspected that I'd feel compelled to respond and it would interfere with my "real job". But, now it's Saturday, so...
On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 12:57:53PM -0800, Matthew Johnson wrote: >>Cygwin/X installs with the cygwin setup and this is fast too. > >Not always. Setup.exe presents a list of mirrors with no commentary >and not even a _hint_ of which is closest to the user in the Web. I >tried 5 or 6 different mirrors in that list before I could find one >that was "fast too". > >That is pretty poor performance. RedHat should not allow them to >mirror Cygwin if the mirror will not provide faster response and better >connectivity. Red Hat does not control the Cygwin mirror list any more than Red Hat controls Cygwin. Cygwin is an all-volunteer project. Here is how it works: Mirror sites volunteer to mirror the Cygwin release. The site is added to the mirror list and, subsequently, a program checks twice a day to make sure that it and the other sites are up-to-date. If a site isn't up-to-date it is dropped from the list. I can't think of any useful way to determine "faster response and better connectivity". If you are in Michigan and you chose a mirror in Brazil, you'd undoubtedly see poor performance in your download. If you are on a network that is being subject to a denial of service, you'd see poor performance. There are all sorts of factors which can impact *your* download performance that have nothing to do with how well-connected the mirror site is. I can imagine some kind of system which tries to figure out connectivity by checking the output of traceroute or some similar utility but I doubt it would ever be useful. I've never seen anything like this in any of the other projects which use mirrors. If you have a pointer to something that does this, however, please provide it. I assume that most users are like me. They find a mirror which works for them and they stick with it. That's what I do with cygwin, sourceforge, Fedora, etc. All of that said, however, I'm not a huge fan of setup.exe. I think it's UI sucks and I wish someone had the time to provide something better. >> > 10 Corporate Tech Support No Yes >> > 11 Corporate Bug Fix Support No >> Yes > >[snip] > >>Is Cygwin/X worth it's money? Definitly yes *g* > >No, NOT 'definitly [sic] yes'. It depends on how much your _time_ is >worth. If your time is worth little to you, or you already _have_ much >expertise with X, Cygwin and Cygwin/X, then yes, it is worth it. But >if you cannot afford to lose the time grappling with installations that >do different things on different machines, demanding you rebuild >password files but then refusing to let you do it etc, or with >"community support" that consists of answers so terse (and all too >often rude) they are harder to understand than the original problem >etc, then no, it is not worth it. Right. In open source, people who answer your questions may be as rude or terse as the people who are asking for help. The answerers also may be as clueless as many tech support personnel. I do think it is pretty rare for people who are helping to comment on misspellings or bad grammar, however. YMMV. cgf
