A few notes follow here. First about approach: you should have given this feedback earlier rather than later since Alex has been off working on an implementation and if you're not giving feedback early then you're wasting Alex's time. Also I would have appreciated it if you had given direct feedback to Alex instead of just dropping your own proposal from space. It's a crappy thing to do.
So notes on the proposal: 1. There's a lot in here about vserver + updates and all of that is fine. But we've been pretty careful in our proposals to point out that how you get to the bits to the box is different than how they are applied. I don't see anything in here around vserver that couldn't use alex's system instead of rsync. So there's no added value there. 2. rsync is a huge hammer in this case. In fact, I think it's too much of a hammer. We've used it in the past ourselves for these image update systems over the last few years (see also: stateless linux) and it always made things pretty hard. Because you have to use lots random exceptions during its execution and once it starts you can't really control what it does. It's good for moving live image to live image, but I wouldn't really want to use it for an image update system - especially one that will be as distributed as this. Simply put I see rsync as more of a tool for sysadmins than for a task like this. I think that we need something that's actually designed to solve the problems at hand rather than seeing the hammer we have on the shelf and thinking that it's obviously the right solution. 3. It doesn't really solve the scaling + bandwith problems in the same way as Alex's tool does. Still requires a server and doesn't let you propagate changes out to servers as easily as his code does. Basically aside from the vserver bits, which no one has seen, I don't see a particular advantage to using rsync. In fact, I see serious downsides since it misses some of the key critical advantages of using our own tool not the least of which is that we can make our tool do what we want and with rsync you're talking about changing the protocols. Anyway, I'll let Alex respond with more technical points if he chooses to. --Chris _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
