Christian Mayer wrote: > The missing functionality is the ability to figure out if the tile has > changed IIRC. > > But that'n no problem - HTTP already supports that. IIRC it send's a > status code of 302 if the reqested data didn't change...
There seems to be some confusion about what rsync is and what it does. Unlike FTP and HTTP, it does more than a date stamp and file size check to determine whether or not to resend a file. Rsync is essentially a binary "diff" utility. It is capable of finding continguous unchanged sections in otherwise-modified files and sending *only* the sections that change. And it does it in time linear in the size of the file and network bandwidth linear in the size of the changes, without either side needing to see both copies to do it. It's a very, very cool program. There is a (amazingly readable!) paper on how it works available at http://www.rsync.org for those interested. For some applications, this is critically important. Simply downloading new scenery underneath your airplane won't be any different, but *updating* preexisting scenery will (probably) work much better with rsync than with any other web protocol. This is likely to be the more important feature, IMHO. In the future, you won't need to do anything to get access to new runway lighting, large building models, new elevation data, etc... Now, whether rsync is really a win for terrasync depends on the details of the data files and whether or not they'll have contiguous unchanged sections after typical updates. I don't know enough about it to say. The only point is that rsync is most definitely *not* a new and incompatible file transfer protocol. It solves a much harder problem. About the windows binary: is anyone really opposed to shipping a rsync.exe and cygwin.dll with the rest of the binaries? I'm not a windows guy, but this really doesn't seem to awful to me. Andy -- Andrew J. Ross NextBus Information Systems Senior Software Engineer Emeryville, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.nextbus.com "Men go crazy in conflagrations. They only get better one by one." - Sting (misquoted) _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
