Gerhard den Hollander wrote:
I subscribed to their subscription program. The price for each update is less thant he full list price (IIRC) , but even so, it is worth it (esp. since I have to maintain a bunch of linux boxes).
For some folks it is.
I do agree that for a home owner the $70 prioce tag 2 or 3 times a year is rather steep.
yes.
Unfortunately delta';s aren't that easy to maintain and test (esp. not over the years .. So you bought 7.0 pro, now they're at 8.3 .. You want to try out gnome (for whatever reason you never bothered). In order to do so you have to: install base gnome from 7.0 and all the deltas between 7.0 to 8.3 .. not to mention that installing something from 7.0 on 8.3 will likely not work or break existing packages ...
It will be hell to maintain for Suse, and therefore the cost of it would be rather high as well .. maybe not $70, but probably aroun $40, $50 ...
If done right, the maintenance effort for deltas wouldn't be any higher than what SuSE now has to do anyway. For instance, the delta for 7.2 would consist simply of those rpms that are different in 7.2 than they are in 7.1. It would be particularly helpful if there was a "latest-full-names" directory at the SuSE FTP site that would contain the latest version of all packages. It would, in effect, be a snapshot of what at any moment SuSE considers to be the best system they can provide. The hard part would be getting the dependencies right so that if you install xyz.rpm you also are told that you need to retrieve and install pqr.rpm and hjk.rpm. However, I believe that most of that dependency analysis has to be done now anyway (Yast seems to know about it). The problem with the current update directory arrangement is that you have to check out every series within it if you're going to update from it under Yast. That whole business of the aaa series, a1 series, etc. is just a leftover from early Slackware distributions, I believe, when everything was done with diskettes. If it has any use at all, the items within a series could be symlinked to their occurrences in the full-names directory. I think that with appropriate upgrade procedures, the world would actually buy more full versions and SuSE would make out better economically. If nothing else, it would be a selling point vis-a-vis Red Hat. Paul