3 ms·

> "Unfortunately, tech CEOs [...] don’t live in areas with shoddy speeds" Even Linux distro devs don't : Fedora's DNF package manager systematically downloads

> "Unfortunately, tech CEOs [...] don’t live in areas with shoddy speeds" Even Linux distro devs don't : Fedora's DNF package manager systematically downloads a file of 30 MB that (I assume) contains the signature of all packages to compare it to my local packages. Even if there are no updates, it still takes 10 min and slows my connection speed. This boggle my mind, I would have thought from all OS Linux would be the one to save bandwidth.

deathanatos 9y ago
That particular distribution doesn't. Gentoo rsync's its main package data, for example.
majewsky 9y ago
On my Arch Linux box, package lists are about 5.8 MiB total. (And yes, those contain basically a list of package metadata and signatures in the repo.) I'm going to assume that Fedora carries more packages (do you have rpmfusion enabled?), so at least the magnitude looks okay. One thing is worth mentioning here: The package manager could easily save bandwidth if it didn't download the whole package list and instead queried the server only for updates for the set of packages that are actually installed (which is usually an order of magnitude less than what's in the repos). However, this approach is not feasible for most Linux distributions since they rely on mirrors to distribute packages, and mirrors only serve static content.
- ramses0 9y ago
  There are several very clever ways around this, with continual rolling updates in a general fashion with only static files. Not static per user, but basically giving (source + diff + diff) on a daily / weekly / monthly basis allows you to only download a diff based on the frequency which you connect. Hell, at this point, just git-clone a repo/data structure (potentially with an initial shallow clone since you may not care about history) and roll forward "as good as git"

3 ms·

> "Unfortunately, tech CEOs [...] don’t live in areas with shoddy speeds" Even Linux distro devs don't : Fedora's DNF package manager systematically downloads

by jmnicolas 9y ago

deathanatos 9y ago
That particular distribution doesn't. Gentoo rsync's its main package data, for example.
majewsky 9y ago
On my Arch Linux box, package lists are about 5.8 MiB total. (And yes, those contain basically a list of package metadata and signatures in the repo.) I'm going to assume that Fedora carries more packages (do you have rpmfusion enabled?), so at least the magnitude looks okay. One thing is worth mentioning here: The package manager could easily save bandwidth if it didn't download the whole package list and instead queried the server only for updates for the set of packages that are actually installed (which is usually an order of magnitude less than what's in the repos). However, this approach is not feasible for most Linux distributions since they rely on mirrors to distribute packages, and mirrors only serve static content.
- ramses0 9y ago
  There are several very clever ways around this, with continual rolling updates in a general fashion with only static files. Not static per user, but basically giving (source + diff + diff) on a daily / weekly / monthly basis allows you to only download a diff based on the frequency which you connect. Hell, at this point, just git-clone a repo/data structure (potentially with an initial shallow clone since you may not care about history) and roll forward "as good as git"