The recent thread... handling new releases

[Ken Smith]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2003 at 07:17:10PM -0400, Garance A Drosihn wrote:

> You just need some automatic way to do it for any transfer
> mechanism.  Eg,
> 
>    1) rsync (or otherwise copy) some small directory which has
>       the meta-info on moving files around.
>    2) locally process the information found in that directory.
>    3) rsync (or otherwise copy) the larger repositories.
> 
> (the above is easy for any "pull" strategy, at least.  Doing it
> via a "push" strategy might take a bit more thought)

Please don't take this as me saying "No" or that this is a really bad
idea.  Please simply take this as "food for thought" in case we do
move forward with this idea.  You have probably thought about this
already.

IMO this would need to be implemented VERY carefully.  With my
"Paranoid Systems Administrator" hat on what this scenario brings to
mind is email reading clients that allow attachments to run stuff on
the local machine, particularly because of (2) above.  The folks who
decided to let the email clients do that had wonderful new features
in mind when they made that decision but that mechanism has been
used for a lot of things I'm sure they never intended.  With much care
this could definitely be implemented in a reasonable way I'm sure
but it's not quite as simple a problem as it first appears.

And for it to have the desired effect *everyone* would need to be
doing it.  At this point in trying to find my way around that sounds
very difficult.

-- 
						Ken Smith
- From there to here, from here to      |       kensmith at cse.buffalo.edu
  there, funny things are everywhere.   |
                      - Theodore Geisel |