2008/7/1 Darren J Moffat <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Jordan Brown wrote: >> If you really must optimize out the "unimportant" changes, I'd recommend >> pushing it as far "upstream" as possible, to minimize the number of >> people who see two packages with different files in them. The stuff I'm >> saying about comparing systems isn't a thought experiment; people do >> that kind of thing all the time. > > I agree on this. The population of the repository seems like the place > to do this, if at all. > > I'd be very interested to see some figures, real or projected, on what > the bandwith and disk space saving from only updating if ELF executable > content is changed. > > Particularly given that there will be cases where some of the non > executable content is the only change to what is in the repository. The > resulting "special case" work seems like it might invalidate the benefit > in the default case. > > I'm not dissing the idea, I think it is cool, but I'd like to know how > much it saves given the confusion that will result from it. It could > cost more explaining why two images are the same.
My belief is that this is only a concern for business or enterprise users. Users with single, standalone systems are not going to generally care about the hashes matching an exact list. As long as "pkg verify" is happy, they will likely be so as well. For users on slow, unreliable, or bandwidth-limited connections, functionality like this can be of great benefit. The last two times I've spent a few months in Melbourne, Australia, I became very conscious of every kilobyte I downloaded given the low cap I had for the wireless internet access I was using. With all that said, I too would like to see what the possible savings really are. Cheers, -- Shawn Walker _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
