[arch-general] [arch-dev-public] Large packages in repositories

[Sven-Hendrik Haase]

 On 17.08.2010 16:28, Thomas Bächler wrote:
> Am 17.08.2010 16:12, schrieb Dan McGee:
>> tl;dr: I think we need some standards with these huge packages, and
>> people need to be a lot more cognizant as to how big they are. We have
>> lost more than one mirror due to complaints over needed space and
>> stuff like this doesn't help.
> If a mirror cannot cope with a few GB, then it should be dropped anyway.
> Our repos will get bigger, one way or the other.

I share this opinion. The Arch repos are hardly large and even if we
added 50 GB to them they would still wouldn't be that large. I know
comparisons with other distributions are probably not a good idea on
this list but it does help to get a general understanding of where we
stand and what "large" really means.

Debian - 428GB (http://www.debian.org/mirror/size)
Fedora - 653GB (http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/DIRECTORY_SIZES.txt)
Ubuntu - 421GB (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mirrors)
openSUSE - 500GB+ (http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Mirror_infrastructure)

Thankfully, we don't keep around old releases of packages or isos. Our
mirrors will never have to cope with the amount of data that other
distributions make them cope with. I think since they are already
mirroring 2TB+ worth of data from other distros, they can easily squeeze
in 50GB of Arch, or more.

I'd really like to resolve this problem in the course of this discussion
since it has been brought up every time big packages are pending (mostly
games). Personally, I think we don't need a policy or anything on this.
Something very odd would have to happen for our repos to grow too much
for our mirrors to handle.
This is Arch, let's keep it simple and unbureaucratic.

I'm not saying "let's throw all that big shit into there" but if there
are potential packages that would improve the user experience, their
size should not be the determining factor to their inclusion.

-- Sven-Hendrik