Proposed F13 feature: drop separate updates repository

[Jesse Keating]

On Wed, 2009-12-02 at 14:39 +0000, Matthew Booth wrote:
> The separate updates directory has been a pain for as long as I've been 
> using RHL/Fedora Core/Fedora. It means you have two places to look when 
> searching for packages manually, and twice as much to configure when 
> you're configuring yum. It has never benefitted me, or anybody I know, 
> but it has caught me out on any number of occasions. What's more, nobody 
> really seems to know why it's like that: it seems it's always been that 
> way, and nobody ever bother to fix it.
> 
> So lets fix it. The package set at release time is only interesting to 
> historians. If any of them are really that bothered, I'm sure somebody 
> can come up with a yum module which finds the oldest available version 
> of a package in a repo.
> 

This runs us into a few different problems.

1) current compose tools do a fresh compose of a tag every time, into a
fresh directory.  It is not easy to just 'add' newer things to a
directory and only keep X number around.

2) the metadata generation step for the Everything repo is long, and
very resource intensive.  Doing it every time we push updates would
cause unreasonable stress on the infrastructure and the people doing the
pushes.

3) the repodata for the Everything repo is huge.  Forcing users to
download the entire thing every day or so as updates are pushed would
cause unreasonable stress on the users's bandwidth, local machine
resources to parse it, and the servers offering it for download.

I think there are more, but those above are enough for me to not persue
this avenue currently.  The pros of this change, which seem small to me,
don't outweigh the above cons, and we have far more other issues we
could be spending time and resources on.


-- 
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/attachments/20091202/446953e7/attachment.sig>