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

[Ray Rashif]

On 18 August 2010 16:37, Pierre Schmitz <pierre at archlinux.de> wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 09:19:09 +0200, Sven-Hendrik Haase
> <sh at lutzhaase.com> wrote:
>> 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
>
> You need to keep in mind that's its not just the disk space that might
> cause problems here but traffic and especially bandwidth are. E.g. the
> our mainserver has about 10mbit/d bandwidth including mirroring, website
> etc..

And it all comes down to paying the bills to better cope with the
load. So the final authority on this can only be those who handle the
financial matters. Other than that, size is not an issue. Big distros
have good funding, so size is really not an issue.


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