On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 04:55:47PM +0000, James wrote > Now that I'm looking, it looks like a policy decision for the devs > to formally evaluate. /distfiles/ should not be a dir for garbage, > one-off-files and other such nonsense. It was (circa 2004 for me) > a repository for compressed sources.
A question for you. A security problem is discovered in linux kernel 3.a.b.c.d. The problem is solved by changing 10 lines in the source code. Which option would you prefer... a) downloading the 10-line patchfile, and having the ebuild apply the patch against the existing kernel 3.a.b.c.d source? b) downloading a new 75 megabyte 3.a.b.c.d-r1 linux kernel Ditto for 120 megabytes of firefox sources, 83 megabytes of gcc sources, etc, etc. That would suck for anybody who has an download cap and/or a slow connection not to mention increasing bandwidth costs for the Gentoo servers and mirrors. And if you *REALLY* wanted, I suppose that foo.exe could be "compressed" to foo.exe.xz with a possible savings of a few bytes, or possibly being even slightly larger than the original. If the files are already compressed, there's no point in trying to compress them again. It provides zero benefit and creates extra work. -- Walter Dnes <[email protected]> I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications
