From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Jul 31 10:49:23 2006 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2EF3116A4DE; Mon, 31 Jul 2006 10:49:23 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from xfb52@dial.pipex.com) Received: from smtp-out4.blueyonder.co.uk (smtp-out4.blueyonder.co.uk [195.188.213.7]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C79D543D45; Mon, 31 Jul 2006 10:49:21 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from xfb52@dial.pipex.com) Received: from [172.23.170.143] (helo=anti-virus02-10) by smtp-out4.blueyonder.co.uk with smtp (Exim 4.52) id 1G7VKq-0005tr-6H; Mon, 31 Jul 2006 11:49:20 +0100 Received: from [82.41.35.166] (helo=[192.168.0.2]) by asmtp-out3.blueyonder.co.uk with esmtp (Exim 4.52) id 1G7VKp-00013B-Hc; Mon, 31 Jul 2006 11:49:19 +0100 Message-ID: <44CDE02F.4090604@dial.pipex.com> Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2006 11:49:19 +0100 From: Alex Zbyslaw User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-GB; rv:1.7.13) Gecko/20060515 X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Colin Percival References: <20060728164526.E27679@ganymede.hub.org> <87slklj9hu.fsf@photon.homelinux.org> <20060729021007.F27679@ganymede.hub.org> <44CD41EC.6030605@freebsd.org> <20060730233839.I27679@ganymede.hub.org> <44CDAA98.3030702@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <44CDAA98.3030702@freebsd.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Gotta start somewhere ... how many of us are really out there? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2006 10:49:23 -0000 Colin Percival wrote: > >There are still a lot of people (particularly on pre-6.0 systems) who >are using CVSup rather than portsnap for updating their ports trees. > > Even when I upgrade to 6 I think it unlikely I'll be switching to portsnap for 2 main reasons: 1) I know csvup; I have config files I understand; there is local documentation which I don't want to have to update. This may change at some point if I have time to become familiar with portsnap and its advantages are important enough. 2) As long as portsnap overwrites local changes to the ports tree, it's not for me. If you want to count by port tree download, ignoring cvsup, would, I think be a mistake. It seems to me that nothing done *now*, will ever give you a count of how many FreeBSD systems there are *now* and that there are disadvantages and advantages to all the systems proposed. Counting portsnap and cvsup accesses is non-intrusive - i.e. nothing sent from local host - will count systems from any version of FreeBSD, but will never count everything because sites with multiple hosts may easily have local propagation mechanisms. But you will get an order of magnitude. However, how do you deal with systems with variable IPs? I don't know enough about the internals of either portsnap or cvsup to know if there is some kind of unique id associated with hosts. If not, then you'd wildly over count for many home-based, variable IP systems. And then there's NAT'ed systems too :-( Putting something into the base system (e.g. periodic), if off by default will find many people not bothered to turn it on, but if on by default could easily upset people over privacy concerns. Also, you'll miss every system which doesn't upgrade to whatever latest version has the counting. It's clear from reading this list for a while that there are plenty of hosts out there not running the latest version, with good reasons for that. But what percentage, it's impossible to tell without some kind of counting :-) --Alex