[pacman-dev] Download options

[Dave Reisner]

On Fri, Dec 02, 2016 at 04:47:41PM +1000, Allan McRae wrote:
> There was many thread and patches regarding this, so I am starting another!
> 
> So far there are two (maybe three) things people want options for to do
> with the downloader.  I see most of these options being set in
> pacman.conf and rarely specified on the command line.  Argue with me if
> I am wrong here...
> 
> Based on that assumption, here are my preferred option names (for both
> pacman.conf and the command line):
> 
> 1) Disable low speed timeout
> 
> DisableDownloadTimeout
> --disable-download-timeout

As a user, I would have no idea what this means. As the person who wrote
the code that this affects, the thing which is most closely associated
with time in this equation can hardly be called a "timeout". It's more
of a threshold.

Some other suggestions, because my shed is better than your shed:

--disabledeadnetworkcheck
--nocheckdeadnetwork
--nodeadconncheck
--nodeadconnectioncheck
--namingishard

> I see no need to separate out speed and time timeouts.
> 
> 
> 2) Set maximum download speed
> 
> MaxDownloadSpeed
> --max-download-speed

I think I've pointed out before that this is a lie at best. You aren't
actually throttling anything, you're just adding artificial delay. You
can also do this from outside of pacman:

https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2016-September/021367.html

FWIW, it's no longer true that curl uses a flat average -- it's now a
rolling window which should provide a smoother limiting mechanism.
However, that's a very recent change (7.50.2), and requires a libcurl
far newer than what we need for compilation (7.32.0).

> I would also accept replacing speed with limit.
> 
> 
> 3) (in a glorious future) Set maximum concurrent downloads
> 
> MaxConcurrentDownloads
> --max-concurrent-downloads
> 
> 
> Any argument about these option names will need to be very clearly
> justified.  I don't own a bike so have no need for a bikeshed.
> 
> Allan