Marcus Meissner wrote:
Are you trying to suggest that you didn't design the system so that it downloads large repo-data lists multiple times with no dialog or progress meter whatsoever leaving the user to think the whole thing has simply locked up? That may be fine when you're connected to the repo via lan, but did it ever occur to you that some poor shmuck might be on the other end of a modem on the other side of the planet?
You are using poor rhetorics and blame shifting.
My rhetoric is to convey the anger and disappointment myself and others feel about the current situation. Many of my colleagues are now installing Debian, whereas they have been previously SuSE users. I have investigated other distros, but for now I'm still behind SuSE. So much of the work behind SuSE is the best I've seen. I love AppArmor. yast is a wonderful tool. And you guys did something to ALSA on the desktop that makes it mix audio sources together seamlessly, which I've yet to even hear of in any other distro. If my rhetoric is sharp, it is to bring the point home that this situation must be rectified, not in some vague "improvements", but in a radical manner. The current zen/rug isn't just rough around the edges. In every category, it fails to deliver. Even if you were to make it pretty, it'd just be a pig in a dress, as my cousin from down south would say. There are other widely used package management systems that deliver far better. I think it's time to bite the bullet and switch over to one of those systems. I know it's hard to abandon work that's already done, but at a certain point, there is more to be gained by starting from scratch than trying to repair a broken system. You should ask yourself why zen/rug was chosen. Is your team, perhaps, suffering from the "not invented here" syndrome? People outside of SuSE have done some very good work on this topic. I think it's time to adopt fou4s as a standard, for instance. 10.2 will be a make-or-break moment for SuSE. 10.1 is widely considered a broken release. I know you don't want to hear that, but that's the way people refer to it. 10.2 will be the deciding factor on whether many SysAdmins like myself continue to use SuSE, or switch to another distro. There's an awful lot of talk about SuSE bowing to Novell execs putting ZenWorks in to try and drum up sales for it. There's talk about Ximian fogheads clouding what has previously been the tightest distro. Others are saying OpenSUSE is nothing more than a beta-test system for SLES/SLED and should never be used in a production machine. How 10.2 hits the street will show us. Will 10.1's issues be an anomaly to be forgotten, or is it what we should come to expect in future releases?
Yes, it is true that some operations lack progress bars and this is still one of them and where we will improve.
There's not even any indication that's it's doing ANYTHING, let alone a progress bar. The other poster mentioned he left the thing running overnight and it never went away.
(And this is yet another instance where the old-style is superior to zen/rug: Size of the repo-data.)
Actually I guessed wrong:
ll suse/setup/descr/packages -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 17821172 2006-05-08 13:36 suse/setup/descr/packages ll suse/repodata/filelists.xml.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 17474199 2006-05-08 14:40 suse/repodata/filelists.xml.gz
Odd... On my 9.3 machine it's half that: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9932014 Nov 8 2005 /var/adm/YaST/InstSrcManager/IS_CACHE_0x00000001/DATA/descr/packages Not to mention that packages is uncompressed, so it should really be compared to: -rw-r--r-- 1 user users 1193587 Aug 19 19:24 /tmp/packages.gz
The original poster said pointblank: "I did uncheck the Refresh flag on the source." And it *STILL* misbehaves. Here's an idea: Have the system download the file only if it is newer than the one currently on the system.
SuSE has set up their distribution so well in so many other places that it continually amazes me how little thought you all put into zen/rug.
Unfortunately the YUM repo format does not lend itself well to download optimizations with its large XML blobs.
I won't dispute you there.
The installation source data should only downloaded once to your machine and cached there. (However I am not sure whether ZYPP does it right now.)
This is one of those things I was talking about earlier that should be thought of *before* release, not looked into months afterward.
The old YOU patches were better, with just the directory.3 file as small index.
I fully agree with you there. :)