Vadim A. Misbakh-Soloviov posted on Wed, 24 Feb 2016 10:38:55 +0600 as excerpted:
>> Is this actually true? For the typical use case of daily or close to >> daily updates I'd think that git would be much more efficient. > As there were noticed multiple times on the list already, this should > not ever happen, at least, until git will support resumable > fetches/clones/whatever. Otherwise you'll make a lot of people, using > bad quality internet access, to frustrate. [I was confused at first as your response has little or nothing to do with the bit you quoted, but rather, with the idea of switching from rsync to git, in general.] While I agree that git not being able to resume is certainly a serious pain for those with unreliable connections, they should be able to switch to webrsync, should the rsync method itself be deprecated. As I've said, git syncing can't replace webrsync security, so webrsync will need to stay around for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, deprecated doesn't necessarily mean shut down or entirely unsupported. Indeed, the implication is that it continues to stay around for quite some time, or rsync (or at least support for it) would be dropped, not deprecated. It simply means that the handbook, etc, will stress non-deprecated alternatives instead of deprecated ones, and that over a period of years, the need for rsync mirrors will go down such that eventually, perhaps one per region/continent will suffice, and perhaps ultimately, only one period, instead of the multiple per continent we tend to have now. Most of the others would presumably be converted to git and tarball mirror resources, with a few converted to webrsync instead, since it'll no doubt get some uptick in usage as rsync fades out. But given the installed base and the number of folks already using rsync that wouldn't see a reason to change, this deprecation and phase down would be on the scale of years, three years at absolute minimum I suppose, and more likely 5-10 years. Do you realize just how long 10 years is in Linux distro terms? Gentoo's certainly past that now, but who knows what will happen in ten years? Gentoo itself may no longer be around by then, or maybe it'll be around, but will only have enough users for a single mirror or two. Or maybe hardware advances will be such that building from sources will be trivial by then and gentoo will either be a top-three distro again or everybody and their brother will be doing from-source distros and there will be as many of them as there are binary distros now. And of course what happens to a good portion of those presently flaky connections over another decade is just as up in the air. Ideally, it wouldn't be a problem we'd have to worry about by then, but I don't think anyone considers that likely. OTOH, it could be that more people are moving to mobile-only by then, and a /lower/ percentage of gentooers have reliable high-bandwidth connections that don't cost an arm and a leg per gigabyte. But regardless of why or how, I don't expect gentoo rsync syncing to have anything like the same level of usage, a decade from now. Maybe it'll still be around, with one or a half dozen gentoo rsync mirrors, but I don't expect there will be a need for the several per region that many regions have now. Of course I could be wrong, but I just don't see it. (And yes, I'm posting this in the full awareness that someone could dredge it from the archives a decade from now and point out how wrong I ended up being. In part that's why the "I could be wrong", to cover my bases, but I /still/ don't see it, and if it happens to be, my present self will be quite surprised, tho my future self might well find that in hindsight it should have been predictable, and I just didn't see it.) IOW, it's nothing individual users need to be concerned about in the near term (out to three years or so), /probably/ nothing they need to be concerned about in the intermediate term (say 3-6 years), and beyond that, so much is likely to have changed that any predictions made now are certain to have missed important events that drastically change the way we look at things in the mean time, and thus be rather off base. After all, git itself is only from 2005, 11 years ago, and ten years ago today, while it was definitely used for the kernel, I doubt that anyone would have predicted it would have pretty much taken over the (D)VCS landscape like it did, github and all. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
