On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 04:03:57PM +1000, Eric Springer wrote:
On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 10:30 AM, Gerald Pfeifer
<gp(a)novell.com> wrote:
What prevents you from using FACTORY?
(Serious question. If there is anything, we should address it.)
Gerald
Yes, agreed.It needs to be easier. Easier to download. Easier to
update to. Easier to do updates, and those updates need to be more
reliable (in terms, of actually downloading).
We are about to see significant improvement here; with changes
implemented during the last weeks, and just hitting Factory now, Factory
should be improved in several regards:
* smaller deltas = less to download, due to "buildcompare" mechanism
(comparing built packages with previous versions for actual changes)
http://news.opensuse.org/2009/02/05/more-efficient-factory-development/
*
http://download.opensuse.org/factory/ keeps the previous package
version available for a grace period. This gives ongoing
updates/downloads a chance to complete successfully, even though
Factory is being republished
E.g. in
http://download.opensuse.org/factory/repo/oss/suse/i586/
you'll note the resulting package duplication
* new, radically improved download backend in zypper/YaST,
http://en.opensuse.org/Libzypp/Failover
http://duncan.mac-vicar.com/blog/archives/507
using aria2c and metalinks, which offers several helpful features:
- without user interaction, it deals with mirrors that are
incomplete, halfway updated or broken in some way, by simply
switching to another one
- it can download faster, using parallel connections to
multiple mirrors and maximizing bandwidth utilization
No more worries about the "best mirror"
- error checking of downloads is already while in transit; not
after downloading everything and then trying to use it.
* mirror selection with stronger exploitation network locality
If a client is in the same network as a mirror, it will automatically
be assigned to that one mirror (not just looking on country level):
http://mirrorbrain.org/news_items/2.6_network_topological_mirror_selection
A further, planned, change is to increase world-wide availability of
Factory by tighter integrating it publishing and its mirror syncing.
This altogether should make Factory tracking a pleasant experience.
At least the downloading part, which is the first step to using it ;)
[...] Then the system should
never be completely broken, and nor packages that aren't READY for
*testing* be pushed. (put them in their own repo, until it's deemed
that they're fine, and the maintainers are looking for *testing*).
In short, try run factory as your main distro for a month -- and the
problems testers have should be pretty obvious =)
Amen.
Peter
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