4.8-Release disk3 and disk4

[ian j hart]

On Saturday 12 April 2003 7:17 am, Malcolm Kay wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Apr 2003 07:22, Brooks Davis wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 11, 2003 at 08:03:04PM +0100, ian j hart wrote:
> > > What exactly is "the effort involved". The packages are already built,
> > > right?
> >
> > Solving a more complicated[0] form of the nice little NP-complete
> > problem known as bin packing.
> >
> > -- Brooks
> >
> > [0] This variant adds a dependency graph problem so how large a package
> > is, depends on what other packages are already there.  It also requires
> > that you assign values to each package to determine which ones have the
> > highest priority since you can't fit them all on anything short of a
> > dual layer DVD (and I don't expect that to hold much longer).  I'd be
> > fairly suprised if you could find two people who gave the ranked
> > ordering of the importance of the seven thousand plus ports.
>
> With the increasing prevalence of broadband internet connections the loss
> of packages from the distribution is of reduced importance.
>
> On the other hand the normal hard disk capacity has increased enormously
> so it is usually feasible to transfer the all packages from a distribution
> to harddisk, where upon the dependency tree problem, I believe, largely
> disappears. Perhaps unsorted distributions would be a better compromise.
>
> Malcolm Kay

Yeah, if it's not do-able, don't do it :))

A couple of things spring to mind. I wanted a set of disks for advocacy. I'd 
much rather burn "the official disk set" than something I threw together 
myself. The "download only what you want" arguement doesn't apply in this 
case.

Surely it's less load on the servers to download 2 or three big files rather 
than 8000 odd files, some very small (eg Perl stuff).

-- 
ian j hart

Quoth the raven, bite me!
	Salem Saberhagen (Episode LXXXI: The Phantom Menace)