> Moving to PLUG where it belongs. > > On Thu, 20 Dec 2001 at 11:33, Horatio B. Bogbindero wrote: >> however, i am quite disappointed with debian. i like dpkg and >> definitely love apt-get. however..first, debian is a humongous waste >> of bandwidth and resources. i unendlessly complain about synchronizing >> with external (US-based) debian mirrors and wasting precious IPL. > > "waste" is relative. Perhaps to you it's a waste, and I don't blame > you. To us, however, the bandwidth is secondary to the fact that I > don't have to deal with what to me is RedHat Shit (tm). And no, I'm not > talking about their name trademark. I'm talking about all the new stuff > that keep creeping into their distributions making it continuously more > difficult for me to keep installations lite. Then of course there's the > fact that I'm not very happy with the way RPM handles system-wide > updates and dependencies. > however, as a systems administrator who would rather advocate fair use of bandwidth resources in the university -- "waste" is entirely this though.
i have to admit that RH is quite crappy when is comes to releasing "stable" distributions. hahaha. they should stop calling these "stable" though. hahaha. >> i would rather have somebody give me instructions on how to mirror it >> properly within campus and not have multiple people download the same >> thing. > > You can use rsync, I think, but then you're talking about I think > around 100GB (if not more) to mirror all three Debian trees. :( > this i would rather do than have each debian user in the university. currently, there are only two but i feel that this could grow and mirroring would be a good idea. of course, apt-proxy would be a better idea (with akamai, squid-http accelerator like intelligence). could you brief me on how i could get apt-proxy to work? as i said, i tried debian before. i just left because i got bored. i am a "rawhide" and "cooker" kinda guy thus leading me to something called "sid". however, i had to connect to some externally located site just to update? proxies are uber cool. how big would the entire "sid" tree be? i do not have 100GB thus making apt-proxy a better alternative. >> adding to this is that fact that debian has this weird (i may learn to >> appreciate it in the future) method for grouping applications (free, >> non-US, etc...) > > free and nonfree have everything to do with the Debian policy for free > software. Which I admire Debian for. Unlike RedHat that ships the > non-free Pine (which I still use by compiling my own via "apt-get > source pine" hehehe). US and non-US are because of the pathetic export > regulations that thankfully the US doesn't have anymore. > ow. never really bothered to read the fine print though. hehehe. i just find it strange. not is seems clearer. >> second, debian has a turtle slow release cycle. this i really do not >> mind but they should branch the trees at least. > > Well, they -DO- branch the trees. There are three: Stable, Testing, and > Unstable. These get various codenames as they go along but essentially > you get the view of the stability of these trees, which is inversely > proportional to their release cycles. > >> if i downloaded the reasonably small and very stable debian 2.2rX i >> would be limited to packages that are contained there and could not >> experiment. however, it i want to be bleeding edge i have to apt-get >> stuff from the humongous monstrosity of a branch called cid. > > It's sid. And I find that unless you update your entire system (ie: > apt-get dist-upgrade) to sync with the unstable tree every time, you > won't be using -that- much of the humongous monstrosity that is > Debian/Unstable. You don't have to download everything naman eh. You > just download what you wanna upgrade. And you don't even have to > download it yourself, apt does that for you. > but, just for you. kinda selfish this way which i would rather avoid. i wanted something communal. apt-proxy seems to be the answer to my debian woes but.... sacha has not figured out how to get it working yet. i would like a behaviour such that if i already download a particular package and then later somebody else downloads the same package it just gets the package from a cache. this way i save bandwidth (or more like efficiently use bandwidth) >> for a bandwidth gifted institution, these are not problems. but, for a >> regular modem user. how long will it take me to synchronize my >> packages? > > This is a valid point. And it's still on my Debian wishlist. But you > can't have your cake and eat it too. The quick releaes cycles of > RedHat, Mandrake, and company come with what I perceive as shit that > I'd rather not deal with. So it's a choice of which you deal with and > which you don't. :) > >> (remember trying to do this during Linux10 at APC?) > > Yeah. Futile. I should've brought CDs of a Sid snapshot. > oo nga. this would have been better. hehehe. >> if somebody can propose a solution to these issues then maybe i can >> try debian out again. > > There are backports in the unofficial apt sources of various programs > backported for the stable tree (currently Potato). Or as I said you can > just apt-get from testing/unstable those apps that you want to upgrade, > which doesn't have to be everything. Or you can get those snapshots of > either the testing or unstable trees from Rene Torres. > like i mentioned above. it is not about me downloading it is about somebody inside the ateneo downloading. i would like things to be cached as much as possible. apt-proxy seems to be the closest thing. nice discussion here. but, i think i have said enough. -- William Emmanuel S. Yu Systems Administrator on Leave _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
