As a developer/friend of developers of several open source games, I'd like to say: huh? Option b seems unreasonable. Making a separate games repo, or perhaps a generic "big packages" repo seems reasonable, but I'm not entirely sure it's warranted. Something that is worth noting is the fact that there already is a semi-official games repo for Arch being run by Dae. Perhaps this could be elevated to a more official status and the games removed from the other repos. Another thing that has been brought up by some of my friends is binary diffs for package downloads. Is this feasible? Would it make sense? Are binaries sufficiently similar to make this worthwhile? I think probably they're not sufficiently similar and that this would require a daemon on the remote end or something annoying like that. Anyway, to recap, I'd prefer games/large packages not be dropped from repos, and I think most people would probably agree with me. I also see that you're upset, but I'd prefer to not see personal remarks (Xyne). Cheers, -AT 2009/5/2 Angel Velásquez <angvp@archlinux.com.ve>:
Hi,
I've syncing my home repo today (like I've been doing since months ago) and I got irritated downloading 595 mb of nexuiz, come on, this package can be popular or whatever, but IMHO having a 595mb package on the repos will be painful.
I propose for a motion to remove packages like games > 250 mb, I am not a TU anymore and I know that, but the waste of bandwith downloading games is *really* killer... A solution could be:
a) Creating an official repo called [games] or something like, where TUs and Devs can put games there (huge games principally.
b) Definetively not upload games to the repos
I am the administrator of two official mirrors, and watching this situation I am really worried if packages > 250 mb (games) will be downloaded / updated eventually and I will have to waste GBs on this.
Please don't take this personal, but IIRC "Gerolde" was suffering for the lack of space months ago, and even if this package and those huge popular games > 250 mb doesn't merely to be on the official repos, frankly (but thanks for the effort to waste the disk space Xyne!).
Anyway, that's my humble opinion.
-- Angel Velásquez angvp @ irc.freenode.net Linux Counter: #359909