[olpc-software] Package manager stuff

[Mike Hearn]

On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 19:04 -0500, Jim Gettys wrote:
> In many parts of the world, long haul network bandwidth is *expensive*.
> And bandwidth in general is not a free resource in a wireless network
> the way it is on a switched LAN.

I didn't mean no compression at all, I mean no compression at the point
of distribution to (disconnected?) laptops. 

If a teacher wants to download some new software packages from the US
for her class, then definitely that transfer should be compressed with
the best codecs we have, but to get it onto students laptops means
either having the students mount a network drive or putting it onto
physical media (usb keys?) for them to use.

If they're mounting a network drive then it's probably best to conserve
battery/flash writes and either run it direct or copy it across.

If they're distributing it on physical media then there's likely enough
storage space on there to not need compression as well.

On the other hand, maybe it takes less energy to transfer a compressed
image and decompress it on the laptop into storage. I don't know how
much energy a network connection vs lzma/bzip2 plays out. Are there any
stats for that?