Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002 11:06:36 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Makoto Matsushita <matusita@jp.FreeBSD.org> Cc: current@freebsd.org, Carl Schmidt <carl@slackerbsd.org> Subject: Re: HEADS UP: Old port recompiles needed (Re: Unknown symbol"__sF") Message-ID: <3DAB07AC.13C25667@mindspring.com> References: <20021014032931.GB23539@carbon.slackerbsd.org> <20021014124541A.matusita@jp.FreeBSD.org> <20021014043821.GC24069@carbon.slackerbsd.org> <20021014191647A.matusita@jp.FreeBSD.org>
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Here's my final statement on the subject: o It's ~20 hours, compressed, ~24 hours uncompressed. o It's 15 minutes less, for a standard Pacific Bell DSL line, assuming you get the 500K/second. o It's 40 minutes out of ~6 hours, for EarthLink or Hughes Satellite broadband, iDSL, or two channel ISDN. I personally downloaded the ISO snapshot from Japan, because the DP1 ISO image was approximately three times the size: it cut two days off my download time. Compression is not a hardship for the receiver, who can decompress in-band with the tools that are available to them, so if there is a local disk space issue (enough room for one copy, but not enough room for two), it can be resolved that way. This is a statistically unlikely situation, given that they could always use the FreeBSD partition they intended to install on, in order to provide temporary storage: it is nearly impossible to buy a hard drive that small these days, let alone install a decompressed FreeBSD from the compressed ISO images. The intent of the snapshots are for people to test out the full system. However, this is not how people use them. Snapshots are frequently used to install -current the first time, in order to get bootstrapped, after which people use CVSup, and then rebuild from source to track -current. If you think downloading an ISO is time consuming, consider the initial CVSup operation to get a local copy of the source tree. Japan and the U.S. are very different. Japan is deploying broadband everywhere. The U.S. has deployed broadband to a very small area, in areas of high population density. No one has properly addressed "the last mile" in the U.S.; instead, they have built supporting backbone infrastructure, and left it for someone else to build "the last mile". The result of this idiocy has been Worldcom going bankrupt, Global Crossing going bankrupt, etc.: it's like building an interstate highway system, but leaving dirt roads into all of the cities. The few companies who have "addressed the last mile" have done so with a broken understanding of the purpose of the Internet: they believe it to be a medium for pushing content to people, rather than a tool for people to communicate. As a result, people are not permited to run servers at their house, and the up-channel is almost always significantly slower than the down-channel. The result of this is that the upchannel is often limited to 1.5 times the size necessary to simply handle the CP "ACK" traffic for the downchannel (do the math on your cable modem or ADSL line). Even if they were to "graciously permit" you to run a server, it would still be a practical impossibility. They want to treat the Internet like television, instead of like the telephone. This is understandable: most of the people who provide "the last mile" are cable television companies. There is insufficient bandwidth for a television quality two-way video telephone call in nearly all of these so-called "broadband last mile" solutions. To paraphrase, "they are all dressed up, with nowhere to go". Until someone addresses this disparity in the U.S., as it is being addressed in Japan, the primary use of things like the ISO snapshots is going to *remain* as a synchronization tool for developers, not a set of test images that get downloaded, burned to CD-R, and then tested for functionality. I realize that your intent is to serve a specific audience, to a specific purpose; I'm telling you, though, that it's not how the images are being used, and it's not how the images *will* be used, for quite some time, given the technology environment in which your users exist. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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