On Monday 11 December 2006 06:31, Rajko M. wrote:
1) Project web page http://www.metalinker.org gives promisses in the same marketing style as menu commercial sites. All is so great, no problems, only benefits, the life is good.
Don't be ridiculous, there's absolutely nothing wrong with shining up your project with a nice website page. In fact that's very good. When I see a new open source project, I'm interested in (i) what it does, (ii) how it helps me. If you want a commercial-like website see: http://basket.kde.org/ ...and what's wrong about such sites? Absolutely nothing. You're confusing traits that might be common to open source and commercial apps and then necessarily associating one of them solely with the other
3) Downloads are verified for enhanced reliability. -Nothing new for YaST users.
Something new for wget users.
4) No Single Point of Failure (SPOF) like FTP or HTTP URLs. -It showed that implementation is not that perfect and single point of failure ruined some people experience. Anything that comes with a lot of declarative sentences and some inserted jokes, can't give me confidence. Jokes alone are not the problem.
That's an issue for you to take on with yourself. Needless to say I wouldn't say this was a common trait.
5) More fault tolerant. -I don't need rsync to repair anything with classic methods like wget.
Rubbish. You can and do.
As I said, the idea is very attractive, but marketing isn't.
(i) there's nothing wrong with marketing. I'm not sure you really understand the term actually, since SUSE (and every other project practically) has marketing, but just different levels. There is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with marketing, but only the way in which it's delivered. Again, there's absolutely nothing striking about metalink's marketing.
The download speed and convenient automation of process are not the only factors when someone uses Internet as a software source.
It would be foolish to presuppose that they're not big, or rather BIG, factors. You think I'm going to wait around at release time for a slow torrent or a non-working main site like? Or, you think I'm going to hunt around through a long list of mirrors, when metalink can do it all for me? At release time, now, if I wanted to get an image straight away, there's absolutely no way I'd go for any of the other methods. Why would you? Download is super fast, and if you actually have problems at the end of the download you can use rsync. Needless to say, this point is moot since we've actually since the contrary in our very raw environment. Fedora had very good things to say about it, but there was plenty of first-hand experience for opensuse users in #suse. It was tested, it was proven that it can work very very well. Regards, Francis.