On Mon, 28 May 2012 00:58:16 +0800
Marguerite Su
Hi, all,
users complained to me many times about yast2's slowness on forums.o.o, twitter or gtalk groups. (of course in a form of flame war like apt vs. yast, yum vs. yast...I don't want to say much about that.)
I didn't believe it, until today I broke my zypp cache, and had to retrieve them all...and I found many ugly things. let me be clear one by one.
1. yast-ncurses.
you have to use `LANG=en zypper [option]` if you set your locale to non-En environment.
or texts will be displayed as unreadable ??????.
see screenshot: http://paste.opensuse.org/40229867
2. if you broke your zypp cache, yast-ncurses will always tell you that you have insufficient permissions so can only see part of its modules, even you logged in with root. (maybe not producible)
3. yast have to download every local package descrs, no matter whether you need it or not.
I think just download packages.en.gz and packages.your_locale.gz will be enough. (nowadays it downloads all of them...du, kr, zh_TW, pl, blabla...)
and it's the cause of its slowness..
it took me 40 minutes to refresh it all...even with local mirrors on.
I have a 4MB download speed, but can only download at a speed of < 10KB/s.
I knew it's slow, but I don't know it's that slow...
the standard procedure to use yast is: a. launch b. min it and do something else c. after half an hour, operate, min it again d. wait until it closes itself.
I think we really need to improve it. like:
(1) try merge package descrs among repositories. most of same packages' descrs among repos are the same. we don't need to download it several times.
(2) make a daemon to download them in background when system starts.
(3) give user options to not download and display descrs/summaries, but to find and install only using package names.
just some ideas in thin air....I don't how to implement it.
PS: I think we should remove the "OSS might be slow" string from translations and yast itself.
a warning is something you can avoid and don't do it. but repositories?
you have to enable it not matter how many warnings it warns, if you want to do things using it.
but are those things dangerous or risky? no. come on, it's our own OSS repo. it's just slow.
and can you avoid that slow? no...
so it sounds to warn users something they can't change. useless and feels forcibly.
it does us more harms than benefits if you think it deeper.
we give our users a bad first impression that it is slow, so it has to be fast like a flash to change their such minds.
Regards
Marguerite Hi Sure it's not mirror, ipv6 or isp related?
-- Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890) openSUSE 12.1 (x86_64) Kernel 3.1.10-1.9-desktop up 2 days 0:32, 3 users, load average: 0.01, 0.03, 0.05 CPU Intel i5 CPU M520@2.40GHz | Intel Arrandale GPU -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org